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UCATIONAL 
■^YANGELISM 



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EDUCATIONAL 
EVANGELISM 



The Religious Discipline 
for Youth 



BY 

CHARLES E. McKINLEY 



BOSTON 

Ube pilarim press 

NEW YORK CHICAGO 






LIBRARY of OONGHESS 
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COPYRIGHI 1905, 
BY 

Charles E. McKinley 



To 
Isaac Addison McKinley 

and 

Mary Allspaugh McKinley 

in token of a 

Son's Imperishable Love. 



Preface 

The following essay endeavors to de- 
velop, briefly and suggestively, a conception 
of the religious discipline that is to be re- 
garded as most fitting and desirable for the 
years of adolescence in view of the spiritual 
experiences through which nature conducts 
the young soul on the road to maturity. 
The standpoint is not that of an expert 
scientific investigator, but that of one bound 
to a goodly company of youth by ties of 
personal sympathy. The writer has done 
his best, however, for their sakes, to profit 
by the scientific investigation of the phe- 
nomena of youth, and his indebtedness to 
all those who, in recent years, have written 
so ably upon adolescence and religious psy- 
chology — Hall, James, Starbuck, Coe, Gran- 
ger, and many more — is manifest on every 
page. Not so manifest, perhaps, but quite 
5 



PEEFACE 



as worthy of acknowledgment, are his ob- 
ligations to the remarkable book by Charles 
Wagner entitled " Youth," to which he owes 
some of the initial insights of this study. 

He ventures, however, to presume that 
the reader will be able to discern, without 
the aid of further acknowledgments, the 
extent of these various obligations, and to 
judge for himself whether, deducting the 
evident liabilities, there remain in the vol- 
ume any net assets of sound thinking or 
suggestive insight. He is guilty also of 
presuming that the standpoint which he 
occupies may furnish something worth say- 
ing, even to one all inexpert in the methods 
of the laboratory and the use of the ques- 
tionnaire. Love is sometimes more pene- 
trating than research, and things have been 
revealed to babes that were not discovered 
by the wise and prudent. And if it should 
be said that in forsaking the methods of ex- 
act science to follow the guidance of sym- 



PEEFACB 



pathetic insight, the author is turning from 
the light of day to wander in the dark, his 
sufficient consolation would be the fact that 
night also has its wonderful disclosures, for 
then 

** The sky is fiUed with stars, invisible by day.'^ 



Note. — Chapter III reproduces some of the thought 
and language of an address at the Bushnell Centennial in 
Hartford in 1902, published in the commemorative vol- 
ume. Chapter VIII likewise contains the substance of 
an address published in Men of To-morrow for Jan- 
uary, 1901. Both chapters are wholly different in con- 
ception, plan and development from the addresses out of 
which they grew. 



Contents 



I. An Introduction to Youth 

II. The Drama of Youth . 

III. The Genesis of Christian Character 

IV. Where Christian Nurture Fails 
V. The Evangelism of Jesus 

VI. Personal Adjustment . 

VII. A Graded Gospel . . 

VIII. The School of Worship 

IX. Aims and Expectations . 

X. Agencies and Methods . 



II 

45 

68 

98 

123 

146 

173 
201 
226 



EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

CHAPTER I 
An Introduction to Youth 

" I WOULD there were no age between six- 
teen and three-and-twenty, or that youth 
would sleep out the rest ! " 

It is one of the imperishable memories of 
college days. The professor in the Shake- 
speare class was calling for choice passages 
from a play assigned for private reading, a 
bland smile playing over his features as we 
gave our patronizing approval to this and 
that specimen of the great dramatist's work, 
varied, however, now and then, with a snap 
of the eyes that threatened to break his 
glasses. 

Did I overestimate the personal tone that 
my classmate put into these words which he 
quoted, as if they expressed his views ex- 
actly ? Possibly ; for I, too, was sick of be- 
II 



12 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

ing a boy, eager to be a man. And I was 
half convinced — what youth is not? — that 
all professors and older people generally 
cherish a lurking approval of the shepherd's 
maledictory wish. 

For is not youth the troublesome age? 
Is it not the self-conceited, smart, restless, 
wayward, rebellious age, the age for which 
mature people have least sympathy, of which 
youth itself has most dread? And is not 
the keenest pain of youth just this, that 
while the grown folks may find it uncom- 
fortable to have a big boy in the house, they 
do not seem to understand that it is many 
times more uncomfortable to be the big boy ? 

What is youth ? A wide, deep river, di- 
viding childhood from manhood ; a river 
which, like the river of death, must be 
crossed without bridge or boat; through 
which each soul must go ; into whose turbid 
waters the child must descend alone, know- 
ing well that beneath their flood his child- 
hood will be buried to rise no more; a 
stream both broad and turbulent, not to be 
crossed in a day or a year ; whose buoyant 
waters will indeed bear him up, but not with- 



AN INTEODUCTION TO YOUTH 13 

out his efforts ; whose currents will land him 
somewhere on the other shore, but, oh, so far 
down stream, on the dusty plains of sordid, 
sinful manhood, far out of sight of those 
green hills of childhood that were so near to 
heaven. 

Only by some such figure can we picture 
to ourselves this wide interval between the 
child and the man. It is a time when all is 
fluid, restless, changing, nothing settled or 
fixed, no foundation sure ; when one is car- 
ried off his feet, away from the moorings of 
early years, and swept towards he knows not 
what destiny by strange, new currents of life 
that he does not comprehend ; a fascinating, 
wondrous time of freshness and bloom, when 
unmeasured continents of power are discov- 
ered in the soul, opening up boundless pos- 
sibilities, and new visions of life and its 
meaning come sweeping daily before the 
spirit's eyes as one is borne along to view- 
points ever new ; a time of exhilaration and 
suspense, while forces of nature beyond con- 
trol rush one forward in the resistless prog- 
ress toward a goal that is hidden as yet from 
sight. 



14 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

Youth has been maligned ; because it is 
easier for Shakespeare's shepherd — and oth- 
ers — to grumble than to understand. 

For the fact is that youth is still the por- 
tion of human life least understood. Lovers 
of children are we all, but downright lovers 
of youth are few. The dullest heart re- 
sponds to the appeal of childhood, but only 
the discerning kindle at contact with youth. 
The last century w^as the children's era. 
Child-life has had its prophets and inter- 
preters. Froebel and Robert Raikes and 
Horace Bushnell and Horace Mann have 
had a multitude of followers. The study of 
the child's mind has been exalted to a sci- 
ence ; the interests of childhood have been 
amply set forth, its rights ably defended ; 
elementary education has been revolution- 
ized, and the world has been led at last to a 
respectable understanding of the needs and 
nature of the child. 

But many of the phenomena of youth are 
still regarded with uncomprehending amaze- 
ment. The attitude of the majority toward 
youth is about this : " Childhood we know, 
and manhood we know ; but who, or what, 



AN IKTEODUCTION TO YOUTH 15 

art thou ? " The largest part of mankind is 
waiting for an introduction to youth ; they 
are still strangers after all. But there are 
those who are seeking an acquaintance in 
all seriousness. They no longer assume 
that they know youth. Youth is no longer 
to be taken for granted and ignored. The 
inductive study of the mind and spirit of 
youth is being pursued with a zeal that is 
according to knowledge and a zest that fal- 
ters at no difficulty or magnitude in the 
work to be done. Many influences have 
conspired to bring the interests and prob- 
lems of youthful life before the world as 
never before. The study of the mind of the 
child was certain to lead, in time, to more 
thorough investigation of the special char- 
acteristics of youth ; the development of 
primary education made imperative a refor- 
mation of secondary education, which in 
turn called for a better understanding of the 
native interests and essential needs of those 
in the formative period of adolescence ; the 
rapid rise of young people's religious socie- 
ties compelled thoughtful attention to the 
serious problems which they raised ; and ex- 



16 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

pert scientists have already done an epoch- 
making work to promote a better under- 
standing of the mind of youth. 

The unique and distinctive character of 
this period, the nature of the process by 
which the child becomes a man, the order 
of development and the character of the 
successive changes that take place, are now 
defined with far greater precision than ever 
before. The way is clear for that better 
acquaintance with youth which is in every 
way so desirable. Our present purpose is 
to look into the naturally ordered spiritual 
experience of youth, and seek therein for 
hints to help in the religious treatment of 
those who are passing through these rest- 
less years. The effort can hardly be fruit- 
less ; and it will be richly worth while if it 
should lead some who are impatient with the 
ways of youth to repent of having ever 
wished that there were no age between six- 
teen and three-and-twenty. 

By the spiritual experience of youth we 
are to understand that inward experience, 
howsoever affected by influences from with- 
out, by which a personal character is formed. 



AK INTEODUCTION TO YOUTH 17 

The formation of his individual, personal 
character is the supreme work of youth. 
The method may be that of the natural un- 
folding of the character implicit in his child- 
hood's virtues, or that of personal enrich- 
ment in character through entrance into a 
more complex life, or that of the radical 
alteration of character to suit a changed 
environment as he passes from youth to 
manhood, or that of a revolution that 
changes his character for good or ill at 
all its cardinal points in a day ; in any case, 
the business of character-forming is youth's 
greatest concern, and the character with 
which he issues into the field of manhood is 
his best capital or his heaviest drag in later 
life. 

Now the process of character-formation 
is not to be viewed apart from the other in- 
terests and tasks of youth. It goes hand in 
hand with the transformation of the child 
in body, mind and spirit into a man. At 
every stage it is profoundly influenced,where 
it is not actually controlled, by the factors 
then dominant in the general process. The 
entire process of transformation extends over 



18 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

a period of ten or a dozen years, from the 
age of thirteen onward, beginning and end- 
ing earlier, as everybody knows, with girls 
than with boys. Within these years a cer- 
tain order of development is practically uni- 
versal, making possible a division of youth 
itself into three distinct periods. The be- 
ginning and ending of these periods are not 
at all distinctly marked, nor are the inter- 
ests of one excluded from the others; yet 
the special character of each is plain. If 
we divide the entire time between the end 
of childhood and the beginning of maturity 
into three nearly equal periods, and call the 
first the physical, the second the mental, 
and the third the social period of adoles- 
cence, we shall have a rough framework for 
our study, a broad outline which is yet ac- 
curate enough for our present general pur- 
pose. 

In the first of these periods, say from the 
thirteenth to the seventeenth year, the for- 
mation of character is profoundly influenced 
by bodily growth. It is the time of most 
rapid, often of sudden and surprising, phys- 
ical development. Growth is often dispropor- 



AN INTEODUCTION TO YOUTH 19 

tionate, and size comes faster than strength. 
When a boy suddenly shoots up tall and slen- 
der, with shoulders too narrow for his height 
and hands and feet too large for the limbs 
that carry them, and all his frame loose in 
the joints, how could it be possible for him 
to display the moral character or have the 
spiritual experiences of a curly-headed, 
round-faced child, or of a well-knit man? 
The development of the physical differences 
in the sexes in this period is accompanied 
by the appearance of marked differences in 
their mental and moral natures. When w^e 
remember that " the hot blood of youth " is 
not a figure of speech but a literal fact, the 
temperature of the body in adolescence be- 
ing about a degree higher than in earlier or 
later years, we should know better than to 
expect from the youth either the quiet sub- 
missiveness of the child or the cool judg- 
ment of the man. When we think how 
nature dowers youth with seemingly inex- 
haustible supplies of new energy, repairing 
all their prodigal waste with lavish hand, so 
that they rush into exhausting contests and 
foolhardy adventures with undoubting as- 



20 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

surance of their ability to make good all 
losses, we are not so much surprised that they 
should take, without a thought of danger, 
moral risks that to older heads are simply 
appalling. And when we reflect that, do 
the best she can, nature cannot transform 
the body of a boy into that of a man in less 
than ten years' time, we may be disposed to 
exercise more patience with the seemingly 
slow progress of our young people in moral 
and spiritual attainment. 

Mental development is rapid from the be- 
ginning of youth, and physical development 
is not complete until the end of the period ; 
but as rapid physical growth dominates the 
early, so rapid mental growth dominates 
the middle years of adolescence. The un- 
folding of the mental powers is even more 
intimately associated with the development 
of character than physical growth. The 
larger mental vision requires a readjust- 
ment of the ideals of life. The youth be- 
gins to reason, to follow intricate and elabo- 
rate processes of argument, to form judg- 
ments based on a more and more extended 
view of facts and principles. Delighting in 



AN INTEODUCTION TO YOUTH 21 

his independence of thought, he takes pleas- 
ure in questioning the wisdom of others, 
and in confuting their statements. He 
shapes his own convictions, and often shows 
a greater confidence in his own conclusions 
than their merit warrants. The kindling of 
imagination places before his mind a set of 
ideals and ambitions, self-discovered and 
self -chosen, which henceforth dominate the 
moral and spiritual movements of his being. 
The emotional awakening that accompanies 
this increase of mental breadth and reach is 
also of vast significance for character. That 
disturbance of the emotional equilibrium, 
that agitation of a soul dragged hither and 
thither by conflicting impulses and desires, 
which is known as the " storm and stress " 
of the spirit, now reaches its height. The 
youth who as a child was entertained with 
hero tales, admired the heroes and dreaded 
the villains, now feels it in himself to be 
in very truth, not in childish play, a hero or 
a villain, or both. His intensified self-con- 
sciousness makes him by turns bashful and 
bold, diffident and boastful, secretive and 
assertive. With overweening sense of the 



22 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

value of his new-found personal self, he may 
become heartlessly selfish ; or the altruistic- 
feelings may win dominion over him, and 
make him more than ever a loving son, a 
devoted brother, a generous friend. 

But the full dominance of the altruistic 
feelings belongs to the last or social period 
of youth. That is the time when one finds 
his place and settles to his work in the 
world, when the life reaches out beyond 
oneself and he learns to know himself as 
a factor in the life of the community, when 
he enters responsibly upon his social and 
civic duties as a citizen. The social impulse 
that rules this time is, of course, most con- 
spicuously displayed in the relations of the 
sexes. In early adolescence the boys and 
girls part company by instinct ; totally di- 
verse interests come to control the two sexes 
for a time. But in the social period there 
is a gradual return to common interests and 
mutual understanding, to likeness of tastes 
and feelings, an approach that culminates in 
the love-making and the mating of young 
men and women to create new social centers 
in homes of their own. All this cannot but 



AN INTEODUCTION TO YOUTH 23 

have much to do with the inner spiritual 
experience that finally issues in a settled 
character. It is to be certainly expected 
that altruistic and social considerations will 
now exert great influence on the process of 
character-formation, and that the rise of 
the social instincts to controlling power, and 
the adjustment of young lives to their place 
and work in the world, will be accompanied 
by marked decisions and significant defini- 
tions that go far to give personal character 
its final form. 

This introduction to the distinctive inter- 
ests of the different periods of youth is 
sufficient to show that the spiritual experi- 
ence of youth must be something great and 
deep and infinitely varied. He who would 
explore it will be led into a forest w^ide and 
dark, which is for some a wilderness, with 
many a bog and fen, and many a trackless 
waste. Many and devious are the paths 
that lead through it, highways and byways 
of the soul in its journey from childhood to 
maturity ; uncharted mostly, and some un- 
traversed save by one who goes his way 



24 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

alone. Yet all these myriad paths, these 
countless forms of experience, despite their 
infinite variety, have one general trend ; 
they all lead through the forest ; by this 
way or by that, with many turnings or with 
few, the youth emerges at last from the for- 
est shades into the broad light of manhood's 
open plain. 

Our next step, therefore, will be the en- 
deavor to sketch an outline map of the jour- 
ney as a whole. Ignoring the fascinating 
details of the personal adventures of indi- 
vidual travelers through this forest, we shall 
note the general trend of their various 
paths, mark the points that all must pass, 
and observe the places of peculiar danger or 
promise. In other w^ords, we shall attempt 
a general outline of the typical, essential, 
spiritual experiences through which we are 
to expect the youth to pass on his way from 
childhood to maturity, and in which the 
laws of his spiritual education are to be 
discerned. 



CHAPTER II 
The Drama of Youth 

During the years that divide childhood 
from maturity, there is enacted in the soul 
a drama second to none in significance and 
interest. To understand this drama is to 
acquire a deeper, wiser love for youth. To 
sketch it in outline, setting forth the normal 
sequence of spiritual experiences through 
which the youth is conducted in the course 
of his development, is the object of this 
chapter. 

In the transformation of the child into 
the man, there are three great things to be 
done. We observe, accordingly, three acts 
in the drama of youth. They correspond 
also in a general way with the three periods 
of adolescence. The dramatic action of the 
first period centers in the youth's achieve- 
ment of his personal freedom ; in the sec- 
ond, in his discovery of life ; in the third, in 
his incorporation, as a distinct individual, 

25 



26 EDUCATIOl^AL EVANGELISM 

into the social body. The first step to a 
sympathetic understanding of youth is an 
intelligent acquaintance with the necessary, 
dramatic action within the spirit by which 
these successive objects are attained. 

How, then, does the soul achieve its free- 
dom ? How does the child set out to be- 
come a man ? 

The child is born into a ready-made 
world, and spends his childhood in becom- 
ing familiar with it. By it he is sustained, 
protected, instructed. To it he conforms, in 
most instances willingly, in exceptional ones 
under stress of discipline. But before the 
child can be a man, he must work this 
ready-made world over into the terms of his 
personal life ; for every man must, in a sense, 
build his own world. When therefore the 
child becomes a youth he casts off the world 
that he has known, like so many pieces of 
clothing outgrown. He begins to build his 
own world. He begins to act on his own 
initiative, rather than at the command of 
others. He feels new powers at work 
within him, preparing him to be independent 
of support and control. As he becomes too 



THE DEAMA OF YOUTH 27 

large in body to be governed by corporal 
punishment, and strong enough to be effect- 
ive at manual labor or manly sports, his 
mind also refuses control from without and 
displays a new efficiency in independent 
work. He can think more surely, see more 
deeply, comprehend more widely ; and * 
withal he is conscious of a new constructive 
power to form and execute his own designs. 
All this unsettles his relation to his world ; 
the physical uneasiness of the period is 
matched by mental and spiritual unrest. 

The ready-made world of custom, rule and 
convention is now required to justify itself 
to the mind of the youth ; and if it be not 
founded on the everlasting rocks, he will 
find it out, and go delving for a better 
foundation. In order to make a man of 
him, nature draws him apart, bids him ex- 
amine and make sure of his foundations, 
sets him over against his entire environ- 
ment, and makes hmi doubt and question 
and criticize that world in which he finds 
himself. As a child, he was in and of that 
world ; now he comes to regard himself as 
apart from it. He no longer relies on it for 



28 EDUOATIOKAL EVANGELISM 

support or defense. He often feels himself 
alone, with battles to fight in which assist- 
ance from without is impossible ; yet even 
so feels proudly conscious that he is strong 
enough to fight and win. A spirit of self- 
sufficiency is awake within him. The wis- 
dom of his parents is no longer wise enough 
for him, and the truth of his teachers no 
longer true enough for him, and the God of 
his church no longer great enough for him. 
The new life that animates him requires 
him to stand apart from it all as a separate 
individual. Habits, thoughts, places, activ- 
ities, and even persons that have been his 
delight now lose their attractions for him. 
In a word, the soul of the youth is alienated 
from its world. 

It is by such alienation that the sou] 
achieves its freedom. The child setting out 
to become a man must be expected to find 
himself in frequent opposition to his child- 
hood's world of ideas, habits and purposes, 
to cease to be confiding and submissively 
obedient, and to seek his law within. Such 
an alienation of spirit, much more pro- 
nounced in some cases than in others, is a 



THE DRAMA OF YOUTH 29 

normal characteristic of youth. One inves- 
tigator found that ninety per cent of the 
young people whom he studied loved soli- 
tude. The reason is apparent : estrangement 
is the price the soul must pay for individu- 
ality. Before the soul is fitted for the ac- 
tivities of a man's life, it must needs retire 
upon itself, separate itself from the world, 
from customs and regulations that have 
been familiar, get its own point of view, and 
estimate the worth of things for itself. It 
is in seclusion that the soul comes to know 
its own freedom, works its ideas and con- 
victions into a harmony, forms its great life 
purposes, and becomes really able to stand 
alone before the world. Like the Prodigal 
Son, the soul must gather all its own to- 
gether and withdraw to a far country ; but 
it is not prodigals only that do so ; before 
entering upon life's work, Moses and Elijah, 
Christ and Paul, went alone into the wilder- 
ness. 

The second act in the drama of youth is 
the discovery of life. Going forth master 
of himself and of his own affairs, the youth 



30 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

makes trial of life on his own responsibility. 
He " sees life " ; he discovers what life is ; 
and his first discovery is tragic. 

The tragedy of human life is this: that 
while none can be a man until his soul has 
achieved its freedom, yet none is wise 
enough to make faultless use of freedom 
when secured. Man is no sooner free than 
he becomes a sinner. Since the world be- 
gan, says one, there has never been a child 
but was told that if he played with the fire 
he would be burned; and since the world 
began there has never been a child but has 
played with the fire and been burned. 
Among the experiences that are universal 
and seem to be necessary for the realization 
of our human estate, that of being burned 
with fire and that of being singed with sin 
must be reckoned. 

We have seen that the soul comes to 
know its own liberty by setting itself over 
against all else, questioning the conventional 
order of the ready-made world in which it 
finds itself, and seeking its own foundations 
on which to build the structure of its own 
life. Such an alienation is a necessarj^ step 



THE DEAMA OP YOUTH 31 

on the road to individual completeness ; it 
is the true self-assertion, in which the soul 
definitely proposes to itself to go about its 
essential business of ordering its own life. 
But new discoveries are commonly ex- 
aggerated ; they fill the field of vision and 
exclude all else from sight. When the soul 
of youth comes to feel its duty to be an 
individual self, it is almost certain to over- 
estimate the amount of self-assertion need- 
ful. The necessary assertion of self in con- 
trast with the external world, by an easy 
and natural exaggeration, passes over into 
an obstinate refusal to learn from others or 
be guided by their experience, or leads to 
an unwillingness to recognize the validity 
of any standard of obligation outside one's 
self. This is self-will, the enthronement of 
youth's poor, inexperienced self, as the only 
authority, the monarch of his world. And 
herein is sin. 

The classical picture of the exaggerated 
self-will of youth is, of course, the parable 
of the Prodigal Son. Its present interest 
for us lies in its lively depicting of 
the consequences of extravagant self-will 



32 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

Kioting in the excesses of new-found free- 
dom, the Prodigal doubtless believed that 
he was seeing life : and so he was — one 
part of it. In the days of swine-feeding 
and starvation he saw the rest. And then 
he saw the whole at once. And this is the 
discovery that youth is to make, that life is 
a whole, all its parts bound inseparably to- 
gether ; that every deed shall have its effect 
on the doer, every act shall be registered 
indelibly upon the soul of him that does it, 
there to bear its eternal witness to what he 
has been and is. No warning or counsel, 
nothing but experience, will teach this lesson 
to most young men. " Whatsoever a man 
soweth, that shall he also reap," is an 
authentic statement of Holy Writ ; but no 
youth really believes it until he begins to 
reap some harvest from his own sowing. 
Hosts of youth, going forth to see life for 
themselves, do not understand that the fruit 
of extravagance is want, that indulgence 
leads to weakness, that to squander money 
or strength or character must bring one, by 
a law as changeless as the course of the sun, 
to poverty of resources, or power, or morals. 



THE DEAMA OF YOUTH 33 

It often takes an experience nothing short 
of tragic to make a young man understand 
that life is one, that act and consequence 
can by no means be dissevered, and a man's 
deeds are his destiny. This experience of 
law is the discovery of life ; and the youth 
who has learned to comprehend life's unity, 
and include both deed and consequence, 
beginning and end, in one view, can hence- 
forth " see life steadily and see it whole." 

The spiritual experience of youth in the 
physical period of adolescence is that of in- 
dividuation, the setting apart of the self 
from the previous environment ; in the 
second or mental period, it is character- 
istically that of illumination, the discovery 
of the meaning and value of activities that 
one has chosen for himself. This illumina- 
tion brings many keen disappointments. 
There is much of humiliation and self-re- 
proach in it ; much also of wholesome truth 
and saving self -discovery. When a youth 
makes, all for himself, his first great failure, 
he begins to understand himself and the 
world. When a course of action that he 
deliberately selected leads to evil and dis- 



34 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

aster, he gains a practical insight into the 
construction of the moral world and into his 
own moral nature as well. It is good for 
youth to learn, as early as possible, its own 
weaknesses and limitations. We expect 
the young men of every generation to re- 
new unceasingly the quest of the hitherto 
unattainable ; but that quest is more likely 
to receive a substantial reward if it abjures 
at the outset the absurdly impossible; 
young men should not expect to mingle fire 
and water, or to hasten God's kingdom by 
leaving the paths of rectitude. 

Nevertheless, the illumination of youth is 
not all disillusion. Even the fallen Prodigal 
was no pessimist. His self -disco very re- 
vealed not only his weakness and demerit, 
but his real worth as well : he was made 
for something better than a swineherd. 
In the orientation of the spirit, youth finds 
errors to be corrected and perversities to be 
overcome ; but many of its hypotheses are 
confirmed, many expectations fulfilled, 
many ideals realized. This is the time 
when the main outlines of knowledge and 
conviction are finally established. It is the 



THE DEAMA OF YOUTH 35 

period of college life for those who go to 
college, of learning a trade or business, or 
trying several, for those who do not. For 
all it is a time of venture and experiment, 
and normal youth is shrewd to heed its 
lessons. And it issues, with nearly all, in a 
well-formed notion of what one means to be 
and do in life, and an established set of 
ideas and principles by whose light he ex- 
pects to do life's work. Just as early 
adolescence shows what manner of physique 
a man is to have, so this middle period 
determines and reveals the mental outfit 
with which he is to go through the world. 

The third act in the drama of the soul's 
development through the years of youth 
presents the readjustment of the young 
life, now distinctly individualized, to the 
social w^hole. After the achievement of 
freedom and the discovery of life's whole- 
ness, there follows, in the order of nature, 
a new adjustment, freely and willingly 
made, of one's self to one's proper sphere. 
How does the soul that has found itself find 
its true sphere ? 

Nowhere is the parable more true to 



36 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

common experience than in the nature of the 
Prodigal's first good resolve. He sees that 
he is out of place, and determines to return 
home. There may be homesickness in this, 
but there is much besides. It is the awaken- 
ing of the homing instinct. A factor of the 
soul's life of whose existence he had not 
been aware is unveiled. The experience of 
estrangement leads to the discovery that 
there is that within the soul which tells 
a man unerringly of his true place and 
destiny. Youth's first free years are guided 
by a weather-vane that seeks a favoring 
breeze from any quarter of the skies ; then, 
some day, there is disclosed to the wanderer, 
what he has carried all along unknowingly, 
life's compass, whose needle points him 
faithfully to the spot where he belongs. 

In other words, the soul of youth comes 
quickly to understand that utter alienation 
is impossible. At the very time when the 
assertion of self becomes most pronounced, 
the sense of the social value of that self 
awakens. The youth not only wants to be 
himself ; he wants to be somebody in the 
world. He wishes to fill a place among 



THE DEAMA OF YOUTH 37 

men. Fleeing from the limitations of child- 
hood, the soul may choose for a time to 
dwell apart ; but seclusion is not its per- 
manent abode — its monasticism is transient ; 
out of his isolation the youth means, like 
Moses or Paul, to bring forth a personality 
equipped for the doing of deeds in the 
world. The soul that has secured its own 
rights of freedom and gone apart, soon 
swings about to demand a place in the 
social body ; and the social impulse becomes 
the controlling motive. 

All progress, we are told, is by differentia- 
tion and integration. It starts with some- 
thing simple. In that simple thing, what- 
ever it may be — the cell that contains 
the germ of the plant or animal life, or 
the family that contains the germ of social 
and national life — divisions soon appear. 
Different parts are set in opposition to 
each other, and that which was one be- 
comes several or many. The next step 
in the development is the combination 
of these many parts into a unity more 
complex and on a higher plane than the 
simple unit with which the development 



38 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

began ; each of the different parts now 
functioning as a specialized organ or factor 
in the common life. Thus progress always 
works with two hands, creating differences 
where there was likeness, specialized organs 
or occupations where none existed, with the 
one, and with the other combining these 
various distinct elements into more complex 
unities that do a higher work. 

This law of progress has a twofold illus- 
tration in the development of the youthful 
soul, first in the inner experience of the soul 
itself, and secondly in its social relations. 

At the beginning of adolescence, the 
youth becomes estranged not only from 
his parents and the environment of his 
childhood, but from his childish self. The 
self of youth sets itself over against the self 
of childhood. He is not what he was. 
There is a differentiation. He clearly 
recognizes the new, and is likely to de- 
spise the old. There is often a painful 
antagonism within the soul between the 
self of childhood and the self of youth. 
But this division is to yield to the forces 
that make for correlation. The self of man- 



THE DEAMA OF YOUTH 39 

hood combines the essential characteristics 
of youth with those of earlier years. The 
man needs the independence and self-reliance 
of youth ; just as imperatively he needs the 
child's docility, trust in powers outside him- 
self, and sense of participation in the life of a 
social whole. Self-estrangement is followed 
by self-ad justment to a larger sphere. Child- 
hood and youth, with all their differences 
and antagonisms, are embraced in a higher 
unity in the mature soul. That is why 
every youth, and every man who tarries on 
life's journey at the point of youthful self- 
will, finds the gates of the kingdom closed 
against him until he turns and becomes as a 
little child. 

In outward relations, the antisocial in- 
stincts of early adolescence lead the youth 
to assert his independence of social control, 
whether represented by his parents or by 
institutions like the school or Sunday-school. 
But this estrangement is only the first step in 
a new line of progress ; its complement is the 
reconciliation that is to follow. For in the 
later years of adolescence, social instincts 
and forces become dominant again. This 



40 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

is the social period, and the main thing now 
is the attainment, by the growing soul, of a 
social will. The Prodigal came to it by 
way of reconciliation with his father. It 
makes little difference who the parties or 
what the circumstances are, if only the in- 
dependent, self-assertive will of the wander- 
ing young soul comes to reconcile itself to 
another will. With the majority, the new 
adjustment is not made by a return to 
childhood's home and condition ; it is more 
often by entrance into a new home of one's 
own. In either case, it is the homing in- 
stinct that is at work making one seek for 
the place that shall be permanently his ; the 
union of his will with that of another is as 
necessary to the founding of the new home 
as to the return to the old. The Prodigal 
was saved by a new love for his father. 
The love of a young man and a young 
woman brings about the same kind of ad- 
justment between free persons, the same de- 
nial of self, the same attainment of a social 
will. The chief fascination of the drama of 
youth, for most persons, lies in the story of 
this readjustment, this reconciliation of an 



THE DEAMA OF YOUTH 41 

independent, self-willed creature, who has 
cut loose from the ties of his early home, to 
his place in life, with the acceptance of social 
obligations and new ties that bind more 
closely than the old — that is, the story of 
man's love. 

But while love is the most potent social- 
izer of errant youth, it is not the only one. 
Every young man who succeeds in business, 
every one who puts intelligence and con- 
science into his obligations as a citizen, must 
» attain, in some degree, the social will. It 
may be attained also through the simple ac- 
ceptance of duty, wherever duty lies. If 
one has rebelled against his obligations, 
sought to find an easier pathw^ay of life, 
been fretful and discontented because of his 
lot, blamed God and hated man because he 
could not have his own way in the world ; 
when he returns to duty, accepts his lot, de- 
termines to make the best of it and get what 
satisfaction he can out of filling conscien- 
tiously the place assigned him, he attains 
that indispensable social will that marks the 
real maturity of the soul. Eeligion also, 
with its lofty altruism, its " Thou shalt love 



42 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

thy neighbor as thyself," and its call to sac- 
rifice, makes its distinctive and powerful 
appeal to the social instincts of the soul. In 
this social period of youth, if nowhere else, 
religion and nature work in the same direc- 
tion and for the same end. And when Love, 
Duty and Eeligion unite to do a work 
which nature herself is striving to perform, 
the youth must have wandered far indeed 
if that threefold cord is not strong enough 
to bring him to his home. 

If, then, the meaning of the action that 
takes place within the soul of youth is to be 
stated in general terms and comprehended 
in a sentence, it is this : 'No man can be a 
full-grown man, filling a man's place in a 
family, in society, the state, or the kingdom 
of God, until he knows himself as a distinct 
individuality, a free person choosing his own 
ways for himself by the light of his own 
knowledge and experience; but neither is a 
man full-grown while he stands alone in iso- 
lated self-will ; only as he reconciles himself 
to his place, his will to the family will, the 
social will, the will of the state, the will of 



THE DEAMA OP YOUTH 43 

God, and freely chooses for himself the 
things that these wills declare to be best for 
him, — only so can his soul reach full ma- 
turity. 

Because the inner movement of the spirit 
in its development turns upon itself in this 
manner, finding its completion in the social 
whole from which it set out, it is a genuine 
dramatic action. But to forbid or hinder 
this action at any point of its progress be- 
fore it is complete is to turn the drama of 
youth into a farce, or worse. Much of the 
sorrow of the world seems to come from 
the fact that children grow away from 
parents, home and friends ; the empty bird's 
nest from which the little birds have flown 
must do service to the sentiment of every 
generation. But the sorrow is not because 
of the growth ; to be the father or mother 
of strong men is no cause for grief. It is 
the arrested development of souls that fills 
the world with anguish. There are some 
men who never outgrow their childhood ; 
never develop wills of their own beyond 
the point of insisting on childish whims ; 
always have to depend upon the stronger 



44 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

and wiser will of a brother or wife or friend 
to decide all important concerns for them. 
And there are many — it is the sorest grief 
on earth that there are so many — who stop 
growing at the point of youth's estrange- 
ment. They cut loose from parents and 
home, from social standards and ideals, and 
go through life in stubborn self-will. These 
are the cases that are sad ; for only in such 
can the power of sin have its perfect work. 
They are the unnatural, abnormal ones ; it 
is clean against nature to stop there / repre- 
hensible, too, for they cut their spiritual de- 
velopment short by their own choice. The 
soul that knows estrangement should never 
be allowed to rest until it knows reconcilia- 
tion also. Let the action be complete. God 
never meant- a man to spend his life in lonely 
alienation from his kind and from Himself. 
Christ did not leave the Prodigal in the far 
country. 



CHAPTER III 
The Genesis of Christian Character 

Youth gets its fascinating interest and 
its critical significance from this dramatic 
action in the soul that we have been review- 
ing. This action is, as we have seen, the in- 
ner action by which a soul achieves its true 
station and degree. Its theme is the trans- 
formation of the child, who is a dependent, 
subordinate being, into a man, who is an in- 
dependent, coordinate being. First, to make 
the child an individual, to take his included, 
dependent life out of the family unity and 
make him a separately effective personality ; 
then to re-socialize him on a higher plane, 
to embrace his individuality in the larger 
coordination of society, — that is the aim, 
and the course, of the dramatic action within 
the soul of youth. 

In the course of this action, the youth is 
brought face to face with nearly all the 
critical questions that affect human well-be- 
45 



46 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

ing. Every personal problem from those of 
health and strength to those of ideals and 
pursuits, must be met ; so must all the ques- 
tions of social relations from that of obedi- 
ence to parents to those of citizenship, mar- 
riage and religion. These questions overlap 
and interblend so that no one of them ever 
stands wholly by itself or is settled alone ; 
nor is the discussion of one of them likely 
to be very profitable unless the presence 
and influence of the others be recognized. 
In the following discussions, the focus of at- 
tention is the religious problem, treated not 
as a thing by itself but as an element in the 
normal experience of youth. 

The religious problem appears to the 
youth in myriad forms, but is always the 
same in essence. The youth must somehow 
settle his relations with the higher law, the 
moral order, the spiritual and unseen world; 
in a word, with God. Some settlement 
of this question every youth must make. 
We of course regard the Christian so- 
lution of the religious problem as the 
only satisfactory one. We shall see that 
religious experience cannot possibly mean 



THE CHEISTIAN CHAEACTEE 47 

the same thing for all ; but the only re- 
ligious ideal that we find tolerable is 
that of Christian discipleship, the settlement 
of one's higher relationships on the Christian 
plan. The religious problem of youth, then, 
in our view, becomes the problem of finding 
a way for the youth into the Christian life, 
of winning a Christian faith and character. 
The Christian character which we desire 
to see our youth attain is everywhere recog- 
nized as the efflorescence of a Christian 
spirit, the manifestation of an inner life. 
The question of the ways and means of at- 
taining a Christian character is therefore at 
bottom the question of the beginning of the 
Christian life in the soul. This beginning 
is itself everywhere regarded as in some 
sense a work of the Holy Spirit, the impar- 
tation to a human being of a spiritual life 
that draws from the boundless deep of 
Deity. But under what circumstances does 
the Spirit most commonly perform this 
work? Through what outward means or 
agencies is that quality of spiritual life 
which produces Christian character im- 
parted to the soul of man ? 



48 EDUCATIOIS^AL EVANGELISM 

The prevailing ideas on this subject are to 
be traced to four principal sources. We 
may pass over the first three with brief 
mention ; but the fourth is so related to the 
development of youth as to demand more 
special attention. 

The first in order is the sacramental sys- 
tem of the Catholic churches. According 
to this view, the renewing Spirit is associ- 
ated with the water of baptism, and regen- 
eration is wrought by a sacramental grace 
bestowed in this rite. What is needful to 
insure the inception of a Christian life is 
that one shall be placed, by birth or other- 
wise, within the circle of the sacramental 
influences that commence with baptism ; 
within that circle, which is of course 
identified with the visible Church, and there 
alone, there is renewal and salvation for all. 
It is to be expected that the life imparted 
to the soul in baptism will be from the first 
the determinative factor in the formation of 
character ; but it is to be made intelligent, 
given a consciousness of itself, taught to 
understand its own nature and aims, through 
the knowledge of the truth conveyed by 



THE CHEISTIAN CHAEACTEE 49 

catechetical instruction ; and it is to become 
the certain and permanent possession of the 
soul only by confirmation, and to be de- 
veloped to full formative power by the 
sacrament of communion. This view of the 
beginning of the Christian life within the 
soul is manifestly a formal and institutional 
view. In accordance with the claims of the 
ecclesiastical system within which it was de- 
veloped, it makes the reception of the new 
life conditional on connection with the out- 
ward institution of religion, the Church. 
Those who reject it and wonder at its con- 
tinued power in the world are to remember 
that the Lord's arm is not shortened that 
he cannot save by means of forms and insti- 
tutions as well as without them ; though not 
dependent upon them, he is surely free to 
use them ; and whether, or to what extent, 
he does make use of them for the generation 
of Christian character in human souls, is not 
a question of doctrine to be decided by 
argument, but a question of fact to be set- 
tled by observation. 

From this conception of the genesis of the 
Christian life the Reformed churches did not 



50 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

at first break away ; but a radical modifica- 
tion of it was introduced by a simple change 
of emphasis. Without explicitly denying 
the efficacy of sacramental grace bestowed 
in baptism, they placed more emphasis upon 
the truth, as summed up in the creed and 
catechism, as the means whereby the Spirit 
lays the foundation of a Christian character. 
If the Eeformation be regarded, as it surely 
may be, as a part of the great intellectual 
awakening known as the Renaissance, it will 
appear that nothing could be more natural 
than this increased emphasis on the power 
of divine truth to save the soul. This w^as 
the common inspiration of the reformers. 
The Greek Testament of Erasmus, the Ger- 
man Bible of Luther, and all the great 
series of confessions and catechisms that 
culminated in those of the Westminster 
Assembly, point to this emphasis among 
Protestants on the truth as the chief means 
for the Spirit's renewal of the soul. The 
practical outcome of this view is to reduce 
dependence on religious institutions to the 
minimum ; the best that human agencies 
can accomplish toward the impartation of 



THE CHEISTIAN CHAEACTEE 51 

the Christian life is to get the truth into the 
mind of the growing child or the uncon- 
verted man, trusting the Spirit to work 
within him and sanctify him by the truth. 

In the eighteenth century, there came a 
complete departure from this entire mode of 
conceiving the Spirit's work. Another 
theory of the Spirit's operation, requiring 
correspondingly different methods in relig- 
ious work, was brought forward by the 
Great Awakening of lYiO. By this theory 
regeneration was conceived as consisting es- 
sentially in a change of one's tastes or senti- 
ments. It was defined as the communication 
of a new spiritual sense or taste, or as " a 
change in the balance of the sensibilities." 
That a marked change in taste and sentiment 
accompanies the experience of adult conver- 
sion is beyond question ; if this change is 
itself the essential element of regeneration, 
then it would seem that appeals to the senti- 
ments, affections or emotions would be more 
likely to promote the beginning of the 
Christian life than any other means. On 
this doctrinal presumption the methods of 
the great revival were developed. The 



52 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

psychology of that day made no distinction 
between the will and the sensibilities, and 
so the distinctive method of the revival 
system became an appeal to the will that 
was emotional in character. It was held 
that the beginning of the Christian life in 
the soul was normally attended by a great 
awakening of the feelings, was perhaps de- 
pendent on such an awakening, and that re- 
generation must be manifested by a radical 
change of inclination or disposition. A 
conscious experience of this kind became 
the only acceptable evidence of regenera- 
tion, and without regeneration, thus at- 
tested, men w^ere not considered fit for 
membership in the church. 

And so the Christian life was expected to 
begin, not in the silent use of the truth by 
the Spirit, but in circumstances that would 
stir the religious feelings to their depths. 
These circumstances were provided by the 
revival meeting, which was an institution 
expressly designed to produce such a dis- 
turbance of the customary complacent 
equilibrium of the soul that the desired 
change in the balance of the sensibilities 



THE CHEISTIAN CHAEACTBR 53 

might easily come about. The revival 
methods that began with the Wesleys, 
Whitefield and Edwards were continued 
after their death with undiminished popular- 
ity. The approved way of becoming a 
Christian was to be converted in a pro- 
tracted meeting. Attention was fixed upon 
a certain type of mental agitation as the 
proper evidence of the Spirit's work ; in- 
sistence on an experience of this kind made 
it easy to undervalue early instruction in 
the Christian faith and morals ; the older 
catechetical system died out ; the Wesleyan 
movement broke away from the confirma- 
tion system of the historic churches ; infant 
baptism was neglected, and the bodies that 
reject it altogether increased with great 
rapidity ; institutional claims were belittled, 
and the personal contact of every individual 
soul with Deity in the Spirit was magnified ;, 
and incidentally, no place was left for a 
child in the Church of God, because the 
Christian life was held to begin in emo- 
tions that have no place in the soul of a 
child. 
It was in reaction against the extreme in- 



54 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

dividualism of this system that the modern 
doctrine of the genesis of Christian char- 
acter by nurture first appeared. The logic 
of the situation demanded a powerful re- 
assertion of the corporate, organic elements 
of the religious life. This was made by 
Horace Bushnell in his epoch-making book 
entitled " Christian Nurture." The doctrine 
of this book, although set forth in terms of 
thought belonging to the era before the rise 
of evolutionary theories, fits in so aptly 
with the newer ways of thinking that it has 
been generally accepted wherever the evolu- 
tionary philosophy has gone. Its agreement 
with the general tendency of the last half- 
century to look for vital rather than me- 
chanical processes, and to believe that things 
come to be what they are by growth rather 
than by manufacture, has made it very pop- 
ular. The former view, along with the re- 
vival system founded upon it, has suffered a 
corresponding loss of popularity ; so that 
among the churches that reject the sacra- 
mentarian theory, the common expectation 
of our time seems to be that the Christian 
life shall begin in some kind of process of 



THE CHEISTIAlSr CHARACTEE 55 

Christian nurture. The doctrine and meth- 
ods of Christian nurture must therefore be 
somewhat carefully examined. 

To the popular mind the doctrine of 
Christian nurture is adequately represented 
by the watchword, " Growth, not conver- 
sion." Christian nurture is understood to 
be that method of ordering religious activ- 
ities which looks for men to be made Chris- 
tians by a process of growth rather than by 
a crisis of conversion. But that watchword 
involves a serious confusion of thought. It 
is the same confusion that has beset the evo- 
lutionary doctrines all along — the persistent 
notion that the discovery of the successive 
steps by which a thing has reached its pres- 
ent state makes it unnecessary to account for 
its origin. When the higher forms of life 
were found to have developed from lower, 
and these from lower still, there were those 
who thought that the question of the origin 
of life had been disposed of; it had not, in 
truth, been touched. Neither has the ques- 
tion of the origin of the Christian life in the 
soul been touched when it is seen that a 
Christian character is normally attained by 



56 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

a slow process of growth rather than by a 
sudden revolution in conversion. 

To get rid of this confusion, we must re- 
member that Christian nurture is a partic- 
ular method of dealing with growing souls 
which is based on a particular theory of the 
genesis of the Christian life within the soul. 
The theory governs the method. The pri- 
mary question for Christian nurture is not, 
as so many seem to think, as to the most 
successful ways of feeding and guiding the 
soul's growth ; the first question is as to 
how that particular kind of spiritual life 
that produces Christian character is to get 
into the soul. In the discussions of this sub- 
ject, it seems frequently to be forgotten that 
life must originate before it can grow. The 
assumption appears to be that if a child is sub- 
jected to a properly devised course of relig- 
ious instruction and training, the particular 
quality of spiritual life necessary to the pro- 
duction of Christian character can be 
trusted to slip in unawares at some point or 
other, or be produced by spontaneous gen- 
eration ! 

Let us not mistake the real point. To 



THE CHEISTIAX CHAEACTEE 57 

take Bushnell's thesis " that the child is to 
grow up a Christian, and never know him- 
self as being otherwise," as a statement of 
the doctrine of Christian nurture is super- 
ficial in the extreme. That thesis is only the 
application of a doctrine wrought out by him 
with the most elaborate care. The doctrine 
itself develops a new conception of the man- 
ner of the Spirit's entrance into the soul to 
kindle the divine life there. It is founded 
on the fact that there is a kind of organic 
connection in character between parents and 
children. Moral and spiritual qualities are, 
in a measure, transmitted by heredity ; but, 
still more effectively, the workings of the 
family life in its essential unity of temper, 
spirit, atmosphere, ideals and purposes, tend 
to reproduce the moral and spiritual like- 
ness of the parents in their children.. The 
family is an institution of such a nature that 
by processes analogous to those of organic 
growth, without conscious design on Ihe 
part of the parents, it will form the char- 
acter of the child for good or evil. Because 
of hereditary influences, and because the 
family is the supreme environment of the 



58 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

child during its most plastic years, an en- 
vironment, too, that works with unparalleled 
efficacy to mold the infant character to its 
own standards, it is to be expected that the 
spirit and character of the child will be de- 
termined, almost infallibly, by those of the 
family. 

Therefore it is to be expected that the 
growing soul of the child who springs from 
Christian stock and unfolds his life in a 
Christian atmosphere will exhibit from the 
first, and more and more distinctly as the 
years advance, the Christiaa character, pass- 
ing from a Christian childhood to a Chris- 
tian youth, and on to a Christian manhood 
by a natural development. And the reason 
for this expectation is not that the divine 
life will slip in unawares at some stage of 
the soul's growth, but that it is inconceiv- 
able that the wise God should fail to make 
use of an agency so effective as this vital 
connection of child and parent to further 
the work of redemption. The power of this 
connection in transmitting the taint of sin 
from generation to generation has been long 
recognized ; it is little short of blasphemy to 



THE CHEISTIAN CHAEACTEE 59 

suppose that God will allow it to work only 
for the propagation of sin. " The only sup- 
position which honors God," says Bushnell, 
" is that the organic unity of w^hich I speak 
was ordained originally for the nurture of 
holy virtue in the beginning of the soul's 
history, and that Christianity or redemp- 
tion must of necessity take possession of the 
abused vehicle and sanctify it for its own 
merciful uses." There is nothing mechan- 
ical or compulsory about it. Christian char- 
acter does not follow necessarily from being 
born to a place in a Christian family ; not 
every child of Christian parents will become 
a Christian by the process of nurture. But 
this is to be the general expectation. The 
presumption is that the Spirit of God will 
work along the lines of vital connection to 
reproduce in the children the Christian 
character of their parents, with as much of 
fidelity and certitude as, by the same vital 
connection, their mental and physical char- 
acteristics are made to reappear. 

Previous theories of the genesis of the 
Christian life had ignored this vital connec- 
tion. But it is evident, on reflection, that 



60 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

the most natural line of approach for the 
Spirit of God to the soul of a child in a 
Christian home is through those bonds of 
connection that lie deeper than conscious- 
ness and bind life to life in the hidden mys- 
tery of being. The testimony of observa- 
tion is that God does not, as a rule, bring 
the child of Christian parents to himself 
either by means of the truth taught in the 
catechism or by a miracle of grace in con- 
version, but by a vital process in which the 
moral and religious qualities of that circle 
in which the child originates are assimilated 
into his character. The Spirit finds his way 
into the soul of such a one, not, most natu- 
rally, through the instructed mind, or the 
aroused emotions, or new resolutions of the 
will ; the Spirit is life, and moves along 
those deeper, stronger lines of connection 
which are not always present to the con- 
sciousness through intelligence and feeling, 
but are always present to the soul as essen- 
tial and vital. 

And so, while the sacramentarian theory 
traces the genesis of Christian character to 
the Spirit's use of the rite of baptism, and 



THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 61 

the Reformed theory to the Spirit's use of 
the truth, and the evangelical theory to the 
Spirit's use of an emotional awakening, the 
theory of Christian nurture traces it to the 
Spirit's use of the necessary, vital relation- 
ship of child and parents. It looks for the 
child's Christian life to originate in the hid- 
den, vital connection of his spirit with the 
spirit of a household that is leavened by the 
presence of Christ. Christ, being the spirit 
and atmosphere of the home, will pass into 
the soul of the child along those lines of 
necessary spiritual relationship by which all 
other family traits are imparted. Christian 
nurture may expect much from correct 
instruction and wise training ; but Christian 
nurture is not instruction or training ; it is 
the impartation and development of life in 
ways concordant wdth life's lofty power and 
fathomless mystery. And the highest life 
can be thus imparted because the grace of 
God is pledged to make use of the organic 
relations of human spirits for purposes of 
redemption. 

This conception of the theory of Chris- 
tian nurture reveals at once its power and 



62 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

its limitations as a method. Because it 
works by vital means and at the very fount 
of life, it can do almost everything for the 
child. But because it can do its work only 
through the vital ties that bind child to 
parent, it is rigidly limited to the home 
circle. It has no other possible sphere. 
The prerequisites of Christian nurture are a 
Christian parentage for the child and a 
Christian household in which he shall pass 
his early, plastic years. There are no 
methods of Christian nurture, but only one 
method, — that of the wholesome, earnest, 
devout family life, enveloping the child 
from his earliest days ; " the loveliness of a 
good life, the repose of faith, the confidence 
of righteous expectation, the sacred and 
cheerful liberty of the Spirit — all glowing 
about the young soul as a warm and genial 
nurture, and forming in it, by methods that 
are silent and imperceptible, a spirit of duty 
and religious obedience to God." 

Aside from hereditj^ the formative in- 
fluences of the parental life upon the child 
are of two classes : those exercised con- 
sciously, with express design to benefit the 



THE CHEISTIAN CHAEACTEE 63 

child, and those exercised unconsciously, 
without thought of their effect upon him. 
It needs but little thought to show that of 
these two sets of influences the second is 
vastly the more important. Lessons, 
counsel, training, correction, given with the 
intent of guiding the child into the right 
way are all important, but not so important 
as the atmosphere of the home life. In the 
ordering of the household, the conduct of 
family affairs, the temper habitually dis- 
played, the language commonly used, the 
sincerity and openness or the deception and 
distrust of the parents toward each other, 
the genuineness and simplicity of their 
religious faith or its formality and factitious- 
ness, — in these and a thousand similar things 
the real character and spirit of the parents 
is shown without reserve, and is unde- 
signedly but indelibly impressed upon 
their children. Christian parents ought to 
make it their deliberate design to lead their 
children to Christ ; but their designs should 
always keep the fact in view that the in- 
fluence that they unconsciously wield is 
sure to have more effect upon the children's 



64 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

characters than any of their conscious 
efforts to do them good. It all comes 
back at last to what the parents are. 

Consequently there can be no possible 
method devised for supplying Christian 
nurture to those \yhose parents and homes 
are not genuinely Christian in spirit and 
character. The conditions on which Chris- 
tian nurture depends for the inception of 
the Christian life in the soul are wholly 
wanting with these. Nothing can take the 
place of daily Christian living in the home, 
or do what the home fails to do. There is 
no substitute for a Christian father and 
mother. Others may give the children 
some of their instruction and inspiration, 
their training and education ; but others 
can give them Christian nurture only as 
they would give them bodily nurture, by 
taking them entirely away from the un- 
faithful parents and placing them in a truly 
Christian home. They are much deluded 
who imagine that the development of the 
organized forms of institutional religious 
life can make good the lack of Christian 
homes. Christian nurture is no function of 



THE CHEISTIAlf CHAEACTEE 65 

the church ; it is not an affair of Sunday- 
schools, Young People's Societies, cate- 
chetical classes, or anything of that kind. A 
church or Sunday-school cannot give nur- 
ture ; for the same reason that a Home can- 
not be a home.^ The Church must do its 
best to bring those of unchristian antece- 
dents and surroundings into the Christian 
life ; but the one thing which it cannot give 
them, the one method on which it must not 
count, is Christian nurture. 

Another limitation of Christian nurture, 
in which we are soon to see a great signifi- 
cance, is that its chief work must be done at 
the beginning of the child's life. It has 
been remarked that one of Bushnell's most 
remarkable anticipations of the scientific 
conclusions of our own time is this : " The 
most important age for Christian nurture is 
the first. . . . More, as a general fact, is 
done, or lost by neglect of doing, on a 
child's^ immortality, in the first three years 

^In *' Timothy's Quest, '^ Mrs. Kate Douglas Wiggin 
shows what a difference the capital letter makes to a 
child. " He was very clear on one point, and that was 
that he would never be taken alive and put in a Home 
with a capital H." Page 172. 



66 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

of his life, than in all his years of discipline 
afterwards." 

Our present^ interest in this limitation is 
not in the important rules for dealing with 
young children that are to be deduced from 
it, but rather in the suggestion which it 
gives concerning the relation of Christian 
nurture to the religious problem as it pre- 
sents itself to youth. That the child's 
earliest years are its most plastic, that it is 
most sensitive and responsive to the forma- 
tive influence of the parental life in the 
days when it is utterly dependent, that 
with the growth of bodily strength and the 
power of thought and expression the child 
begins to lose plasticity though still remain- 
ing in the matrix of the home life, are facts 
of the greatest import for those who would 
bring their young children up in the nurture 
and admonition of the Lord. Our special 
concern, however, is to see what becomes of 
Christian nurture when the disturbances of 
youth break out. This will be the theme of 
the next chapter to which the present is linked 
by this consideration : — Because Christian 
nurture worlcs hy the vital connection of 



THE CHEISTIA]S^ CHAEACTEE 67 

parent and child ^ it must get its work done 
Ijefore the individuation of the child takes 
place / and hecause that individuation niust^ 
in the nature of things^ takeplace^ Christian 
nurture is to he regarded as intrinsically a 
preparatory y never a fiial^ work. 



CHAPTER IV 
Where Christian Nurture Fails 

Effective and well-nigh omnipotent as 
Christian nurture appears to be with child- 
hood, with the dawn of youth its power 
begins suddenly, strangely, but certainly, to 
wane. When we look that it should bring 
forth grapes, it often brings forth wild 
grapes, or even only the ashes of disap- 
pointment. 

One would expect that the children who 
have had the advantages of Christian nurture 
would, on reaching adolescence, manifest a 
decided superiority over those without such 
advantages in dealing with the religious 
problem. But the facts in this connection 
are distinctly disappointing. Of course the 
old saw about ministers' sons and deacons' 
daughters has only a grain of truth in 
it; but that grain is significant. It does 
often happen that those who have been 
most carefully and lovingly nurtured ex- 
68 



WHEEE NUETUEE FAILS 69 

hibit pronounced irreligious tendencies in 
youth, while those who have been with- 
out religious influences at home often be- 
come most earnest and acceptable Chris- 
tians. 

One way of explainirfg this is to say that 
Christian parents do not always know how 
to deal with their children, and that their 
nurture is consequently faulty — which is 
likely to be and remain true as long as 
parents are mortal and fallible ; while on 
the other hand, there are few families, even 
the most openly irreligious, whose children 
are not disciplined in some of the funda- 
mental requirements of that law of morals 
which is a schoolmaster to lead men to 
Christ. This explanation is quite true, but 
wholly insufficient. It ignores the deeper 
cause that we are trying to get recognized, 
namely, the work that nature is doing in the 
soul of the youth himself. 

The real reason why so many children of 
Christian nurture become irreligious youths, 
while children without such nurture mani- 
fest a deeply religious spirit at adolescence, 
is found in the self-estrangement of the 



70 EDUCATIOI^^AL EVANGELISM 

youthful soul. This is nature's way of 
evening up the religious opportunities and 
responsibilities of the two classes. She 
makes the child of the Christian home 
take the attitude of a stranger toward his 
early training, the standards and ideals in 
which he has been nurtured, and the habits 
already formed, in order that he may learn 
whether these things are really a part of 
him or not; he must find himself at any 
cost, and if his true self be not in these 
things, he must know it. This makes him, 
at least for a time and in a measure, appear 
irreligious. On the other hand, nature 
makes the child of the irreligious home 
feel himself a stranger to the ideals and 
practices* of that circle, takes him into that 
region of religious faith and aspiration which 
is to him the far country, and asks him to 
find himself there. And so it comes about 
that the advantage of the one and the handi- 
cap of the other are very nearly canceled, 
and the children of Christian and unchristian 
homes approach the questions of religion in 
youth with minds alike open to the truth, 
and with far less of favorable or unfavorable 



WHEEE N'UETUEE FAILS ^ 71 

predisposition than we should expect. The 
real advantage of the child of Christian 
parents lies, not in having religious ques- 
tions already decided when he reaches 
adolescence, but, as we shall see later, in a 
very different direction. 

In our interpretation of the inner drama 
of youth, we have used the parable of the 
Prodigal Son to illustrate a certain estrange- 
ment of soul, in order to a realization of 
individual freedom and responsibility, which 
was set forth as a natural, normal element 
in the spiritual experience of adolescence. 
Lest it should be thought that it is natural 
only to prodigals, and that it is dangerous 
to admit that such a feeling has any right- 
ful place in the ^oul, we must take further 
pains to show its true character and its 
practical necessity. For contrast with the 
prodigal we take, not his older brother, nor 
any ordinary boy ; we take the boy Jesus him- 
self. The universal truth of estrangement 
and reconciliation has its illustration in the 
experience of the universal man. 

The full meaning of our Lord's story of 
the boy that was lost and found again, 



72 ^ EDUCATIONAL EVAKGELISM 

dawns first upon us when we connect it with 
the fact that our Lord himself, in the early 
days of his youth, was lost and found 
again. 

Just one incident of the youth of Jesus is 
recorded in the sacred volume ; and that is 
the story of his break with his parents, and 
his reconciliation to them. How illumi- 
nating this record is ! and how enhearten- 
ing ! Lest we should think that because our 
youthful estrangement always does involve 
sin it always must, and the thought depress 
us beyond measure, the archetypal man 
passed through it, was lost and found again, 
without sin. 

" After three days they found him in the 
temple." The words recall the whole story 
— no need to repeat it. Only observe that 
this was the meaning of youth to Jesus — 
separation from his parents and entrance 
into a larger sphere. No longer did the 
word of father and mother suffice him : he 
must inquire of the doctors in the temple ! 
Nay, not even they could satisfy his ado- 
lescent mind ; he listened to them with re- 
spect, but questioned their conventional re- 



WHEEE NUETUEE FAILS 73 

plies ; and they were amazed at the penetra- 
tion and independence of thought displayed 
in his words. Thus the soul of Jesus, like 
the soul of every other boy, began on enter- 
ing youth to round itself off into a separate 
individuality. That first separation from 
his parents was the significant beginning of 
an estrangement of soul that made Jesus 
more and more to stand alone until he be- 
came the one Perfect Individual, the realized 
ideal of manhood, hailed everywhere with 
mocking words now made worshipful, " Be- 
hold, the man ! " 

But the priceless comfort of this record is 
that while Jesus was growing up beyond his 
parents, he was not growing away from 
them. He could exceed them without an- 
tagonizing them ; as the luxuriant vine that 
covers a whole trellis never despises the lit- 
tle narrow space of earth through which it 
came forth into the free air and sunshine. 
The first independent act of our Lord that 
is recorded was this : " The boy Jesus tar- 
ried behind in Jerusalem." For that act he 
felt no contrition when his parents found 
him ; his only words were of surprise that 



74 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

they should not have known that he would 
be in his Father's house. He was not sorry 
that he had lingered ; he did not repent of 
having sought instruction that his parents 
were not competent to give. But this first 
assertion of his independent selfhood in- 
volved no stubborn self-will ; as there was 
no sin to repent of, so there was no obstacle 
to make reconciliation difficult. " lie went 
down with them, and came to Nazareth ; 
and he was subject unto them." 

Years afterward there came a day when 
Jesus declared his independence of his 
mother in more explicit words, that have 
always seemed harsh to us : ''Woman, what 
have I to do with thee ? " Nevertheless, he 
found it possible even then to reconcile him- 
self to her wish and do what she desired. 
Still later, when men said, " He is beside 
himself," and his relatives came to lead him 
away, he declared his independence of them 
only to assert his union with mankind : 
" Who is my mother and my brethren ? 
And looking round on them that sat round 
about him, he saith. Behold, my mother and 
my brethren ! For whosoever shall do the 



WHEEE JfUETUEE FAILS 75 

will of God, the same is my brother, and 
sister, and mother." So, step by step, 
throughout his whole life, Jesus linked each 
self-assertion of his individual soul to an act 
in which he identified himself with a higher 
will. Never on earth was elsewhere seen 
such self-assertion as that of Jesus, passing 
up from the confident words of a teacher to 
his pupils to culminate in the astounding 
declaration, " All authority hath been given 
unto me in heaven and on earth." Yet never 
did earth see such humility, for this soul, so 
remarkably individualized, seemed never to 
be separate from the Highest. " I can of 
myself do nothing. ... I seek not mine 
own will, but the will of him that sent me." 
And if any one imagines that this perfect 
reconciliation with the Father's will re- 
quired no effort on the part of Jesus, that 
he never found himself in a far country 
whence he could return to his Father only 
at great cost, let him remember Gethsemane, 
and judge by the struggling of that soul that 
was exceeding sorrowful even unto death, 
and by that agonizing prayer, and by that 
bloody sweat, how much it cost the Saviour 



76 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

to achieve his final reconciliation with his 
Father and the lot appointed him, so that he 
could say, " Not my will, but thine, be done! " 

We find, then, two distinct types of the 
estrangement of youth. The Prodigal 
sinned ; Jesus did not. The one represents 
self-discovery through an experience involv- 
ing some moral offense ; the other shows 
that it is possible to attain individual and 
social perfection without sin. We are led 
therefore to expect marked differences in 
the experience of youth at the period of ado- 
lescent estrangement. Some will approach 
the type of the Prodigal ; others, though not 
without sin, will approach the type pre- 
sented in Jesus. 

It has been common to treat the differ- 
ence as wholly a moral difference : tKe boys 
of the one type are called bad boys, the 
others good. Or it has been said, when a 
youth went the way of the Prodigal, that 
there must have been something wrong with 
his home training, and a wiser Christian 
nurture might have prevented his fall. In 
reality the difference is largely temperamen- 
tal. It appears among children of the best 



WHEEE NUETUEE FAILS 77 

Christian homes as certainly as elsewhere. 
Before we conclude that Christian nurture 
can make Christian men and women of our 
children without any imitation of the Prodi- 
gal by any of them, we must patiently con- 
sider the effect of temperament upon the re- 
ligious experience of youth. 

Even those who have least use for physio- 
logical psychology recognize the correlation 
of the spiritual nature with the brain and nerv- 
ous system. The two sets of nerves, sensor 
and motor, correspond to two sides of the spir- 
itual nature, the receptive and the active. In 
every individual, one side of the nervous 
system, and the corresponding side of the 
spiritual nature, tends to predominate. 
Some are more active, others more recep- 
tive. Some are quick, energetic, practical ; 
others are slow, thoughtful, sentimental. 
The first are called quick-tempered; the 
second, easy or even-tempered. This is the 
primary distinction between the tempers or 
temperaments of men. It is crossed by 
another line of distinction dividing the 
strong from the weak, or, more accurately, 
the intense from the moderate. This gives 



78 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

four great types of temperament, corre- 
sponding rather closely with the four tradi- 
tional types. There is the weak motor 
temperament, that of the enthusiast, called 
the sanguine. The strong motor tempera- 
ment is that of the men of action, the in- 
tense, hot-tempered men; it was formerly 
called the choleric, but the ancient name is 
without significance now, and a more de- 
scriptive term is desirable, such as " ener- 
getic." The strong sensor temperament is 
that of the man of thought, reflection and 
sentiment ; some have replaced the ancient 
meaningless name " melancholic " by " sen- 
timental " ; we prefer " reflective " as more 
accurate. Finally, the weak sensor temper- 
ament is that of the slow-and-steady man, 
the sluggish man, or the heavy conserva- 
tive ; it is called the " phlegmatic," and the 
word has passed into common speech with 
just the meaning attached to it here. 

Few mature people exhibit the character- 
istics of any one of these temperaments in 
their purity, because the work of education 
does so much to bring one's nature into bal- 
ance, overcoming the excesses of one's pe- 



WHEEE NUETUEE FAILS 79 

culiar temperament. But at the time of 
adolescence, temperamental peculiarities as- 
sert themselves with full vigor ; and they 
are strong enough to determine the form, 
and often to affect the content, of the 
youth's religious experience. 

What, then, is the influence of tempera- 
ment upon religion ? It has been observed 
that there is a predominance of persons of 
the sanguine and reflective temperaments in 
the churches, especially in those circles 
within the churches that are counted more 
spiritual. It has also been observed that 
the spiritual exercises of the Church, in both 
Catholic and Protestant communions, appeal 
especially to these two temperaments ; the 
Catholic ideal of spirituality finds response 
chiefly among the reflective or sentimental, 
while the preaching, songs and methods of 
the Protestant revival, or the '^ wide-awake " 
prayer-meeting, are especially adapted to 
the sanguine. From these facts it is easy to 
infer that the predominance of sanguine and 
reflective people, in the Church is due to 
the fact that its exercises appeal especially 
to these two temperaments, and that a 



80 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

change in the character of these exercises 
would bring in a predominance of the ener- 
getic or phlegmatic men. But it would be 
just as true to say that the exercises of the 
church suit these temperaments best because 
there has always been a majority of this 
class of people in the church to determine 
what the tone of the church life should be. 
The real reason for the predominance of the 
sanguine and reflective temperaments among 
the more actively religious people lies in a 
different direction. 

It is the exceedingly simple reason, that 
religion is easier for these temperaments 
than for the others. 

Reduced to the simplest possible terms — 
or term^religion is love. The love that is 
religion, whether shown toward God or fel- 
low man, is essentially a self-devotion. 
What religion requires of every man is that 
he shall subdue himself in unselfish love. 
This involves a fundamental self-surrender 
to a higher will, a conscious self-subjection 
to the law of a Master, an enlistment in his 
cause. This is not easy for any, perhaps, but 
it is easier for two types of men than for two 



WHEEE NUETTJEE FAILS 81 

others. Your sanguine man will find it 
comparatively easy ; if only his enthusiasm 
is stirred, it will carry him on. Your re- 
flective man will find it not so hard, because 
his sober convictions and dearest sentiments 
point that way. But your active, energetic, 
hot-tempered man, the forceful man that 
does most of the rough-and-ready work of 
the world, will find it exceedingly hard, be- 
cause the self in him is far more intensely 
assertive, and cannot be so readily subdued. 
And your slow, phlegmatic man will find it 
hard, because the appeal for self-devotion 
awakens no enthusiasm, kindles no respon- 
sive fires, in his breast; religion for him 
must be a matter of cool calculation and 
clear perception of duty. Here is the con- 
stitutional reason for the predominance of 
the sanguine and reflective temperaments in 
the Church ; it is because these tempera- 
ments find self-conquest, self-devotion to 
another's cause, self-surrender to a higher 
will, much easier than the others. 

But the value of an attainment is meas- 
ured by its difficulty. The men who become 
Christians hardest often make the best 



82 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

Christians. Eeligioa does its greatest work 
in those temperaments that respond to it 
least readily. Nathanael was a reflective 
temperament, an Israelite in whom there 
was no guile before he ever met with Jesus ; 
but even after becoming one of the chosen 
Twelve he never did a single thing signifi- 
cant enough to be recorded. Peter was a 
great, robust, hot-tempered, coarse-grained, 
profane man, with a lot of work for grace 
to do in his nature before he could be sanc- 
tified ; but Peter was worth more to the 
cause of Christ than a hundred Nathanaels. 
It has probably always been true, and is 
likely to be true in the future, that the san- 
guine and reflective temperaments form the 
majority among professed Christians ; but 
the minority, made up of forceful men of 
action and those slow and steady natures 
that can hold on and endure with inexhaust- 
ible patience, do the most effective work and 
wield the greatest influence. The sanguine 
temperament gives us the most enthusiastic 
leaders, the most stirring preachers, the 
most affecting singers ; the reflective tem- 
perament furnishes most of the scholars and 



WHBEB NUETUEE FAILS 83 

thinkers ; but the energetic and phlegmatic 
temperaments supply the most effective or- 
ganizers and administrators, the best mis- 
sionaries, and the most reliable supporters 
of the Church. 

This consideration of temperamental dif- 
ferences furnishes a most suggestive insight 
into the behavior of young people when the 
estrangement of youth comes over them. 
The sanguine boy is very likely to be " car- 
ried away " with something ; if with en- 
thusiasm for religion — usually represented 
to him by some class or society — it is well, 
only we are to remember that he may be 
one of those who, having no root in them- 
selves, soon wither. The reflective boy will 
be the doubter, astonish you with skeptical 
questions, and have real and serious strug- 
gles with his beliefs and convictions ; he 
will do the most earnest thinking, and be 
most likely to come into the church from 
the Sunday-school or pastor's class. The 
active, energetic boy, who always plunges 
deep when he goes in at all, is very likely to 
be the prodigal, and the sluggish, phleg- 
matic boy will be the tame elder brother, 



84 EDXJCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

who never goes into the far country and 
never learns the depth and sweetness of the 
Paternal love in whose sunshine he daily 
moves. In general, it is pretty sure that the 
boys of , sanguine and energetic tempera- 
ments — the " motor-minded " youth, will ex- 
perience a more violent estrangement, go 
further in risks of sin, break more com- 
pletely with their past training and ideals, 
than the others. There is therefore a deep 
reason in human nature why some boys 
should follow in youth the example of the 
Prodigal, and some the example of Jesus ; 
and that reason is not that those of the one 
class are worse morallj^ than the others, but 
that they are different temperamentally. 
Whence it follows, that no system of Chris- 
tian nurture or culture can possibly secure 
anything like a uniform religious experience 
for those of different temperaments. Only 
dismal disappointment waits for him who 
expects to bring these four boys to Christ in 
the same way. 

There is another matter to be considered 
here. Sex, as well as temperament, has 
much to do with the form that religious ex- 



WHBEE NUETUEE FAILS 85 

perience takes in youth. For one thing, it 
is pretty well established that women, by 
nature, approach more nearly on the ^vhole 
to the sanguine and reflective types of tem- 
perament among men than to the others ; 
not that there are no energetic or phleg- 
matic women, but that their energy is not so 
coarse, and their passivity seldom so dull. 
Therefore, the same reasons that make the 
sanguine and reflective types of men prevail 
in the church, tend to bring in a majority 
of women. The women are most likely to 
respond to appeals that are suited to men of 
those types. Moreover, the requirement of 
self-devotion finds in the feminine nature its 
preeminent object. The kind of self-devo- 
tion that religion requires comes far more 
easily to women than to even sanguine or 
reflective men. It is easier by nature, and 
long custom has made it easier still. Self- 
devotion, self-surrender to another, self-con- 
secration to another's cause, have always 
been woman's peculiar privilege, her most 
winsome characteristic, and her most com- 
manding claim on man's grateful love. A 
deep instinct of humanity says that it is 



86 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

good and right that a woman should give 
herself to her husband, leaving home, family, 
friends, even her very name, to identify her- 
self with him and his. And it is clean 
against nature to reverse the process, sim- 
ply because nature has made it easier for 
women to surrender their all in self-devo- 
tion than for men. 

That is one reason why religion, in its es- 
sence, comes easier to women than to men. 
There is another, which applies with es- 
pecial force to the organized and social re- 
ligion of the church. It is because women 
are more racial by constitution than men. 
Here is surely one of the deepest differences 
between the sexes. There is a certain great 
racial type of what nature means a human 
being to be, maintained from age to age. 
Scientists have observed that in the course 
of evolution, it is through the female that 
this type is maintained. The male is not so 
constant ; he is more completely, sometimes 
extravagantly, individualized ; in him the 
most pronounced variations appear ; nature 
tries her boldest experiments with him. It 
is natural to expect in man, therefore, the 



WHEEE NUETUEE FAILS 87 

more pronounced and extreme individuali- 
ties, while woman keeps closer to the racial 
type. He goes forth to seek new good, 
while she conserves and passes on to fu- 
ture generations the good already attained 
by the race. This means that in religion 
man's nature impels him to seek a new and 
unique religious experience for himself, 
while woman's moves her to take up and 
hold fast the approved good in the experi- 
ence of the race. She is therefore more 
social in her religious experience, goes more 
easily with a company, conforms without 
serious objection to custom and convention 
in this as in other things ; while man is 
more individual, fights out more battles 
with sin and doubt alone, rebels more often 
against conventional ideas and practices, 
and compasses a wider sweep of wandering 
before he settles in his Father's house. For 
this reason it is more natural for women 
than for men to join the church. We do 
not say, or believe, that they are more re- 
ligious than men ; but conventional and 
social religion comes more easily to them. 
The very thing that makes it easier for the 



88 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

women to follow the fashions and maintain 
the social conventionalities, also makes it 
easier for them to find their places in the 
church. And if a church has more male 
than female members, there is something 
abnormal in its condition, and it is not es- 
pecially to be congratulated. 

But here again, religion's hardest work is 
its best work. A church made up wholly of 
women would not be a very influential 
church. But a few strong men, who have 
had manful struggles with doubt and sin, 
and deep personal experiences of salvation, 
when united with twice their number of 
faithful women, make up a church full of 
power. The constitutional difference be- 
tween the sexes that we have just consid- 
ered suggests that as a rule religion must 
hold its own through the women ; it must 
make its chief advances through the men. 
The great work of preserving and passing 
on to posterity the garnered good of the 
ages is largely a work that men cannot do. 
But the advances of each new age are made 
by the incorporation into the religious body 
of new and distinctive individuals, men of 



WHEEE NUETUEE FAILS 89 

pronounced character and critical experience 
of the religious verities that bear especially 
upon the present. Without the women, the 
Church would soon be scattered; without 
the men it would be fossilized. 

It is now obvious that the kind of Chris- 
tian nurture that suflBices to bring the girls 
into the church, when in adolescence their 
racial instincts awake to life, will not suffice 
for the boys, because their instincts impel 
them to a widely different experience. Boy 
and girl are religious beings of different 
mold. It is stupid in us not to see it ; and 
it is folly, if not sin, for us to blame the 
boy for yielding a less ready obedience to 
religious influences than his sister yields. 

Is there then a normal type of religious 
experience for youth? Manifestly not. 
Differences of temperament and sex make 
that forever impossible. The one thing 
common to all youthful experiences is the 
realization of a separate personality, a per- 
sonal character. But not all can realize a 
personal character, even a character copied 
from the divine model given in Jesus, by the 
same course. One method is for the youth 



90 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

to enter gradually upon the new possession 
of his own mind and character, taking the 
lessons of childhood one by one and testing 
them by the larger experience into which he 
has come ; finding point by point, with in- 
creasing delight, that his personal experience 
of life corresponds with the teaching of his 
early years and proves it true ; until at last 
his whole fund of knowledge, his entire re- 
ligious mind, is made over into a new pos- 
session, and he is renewed in spirit through 
a personal experience of growth in knowl- 
edge and grace, and finds himself firmly 
grounded in the essentials of a Christian 
character. 

But for those of different temperament, 
the achievement of individual character 
means a sweeping declaration of inde- 
pendence of all the teaching and prac- 
tices of early years. They doubt the truth 
of the lessons that they have been taught, 
not point by point in the way of testing 
them, but all in bulk. They put themselves 
in opposition to their early training and the 
wisdom expressed in it. The more com- 
pletely they have been enveloped in a relig- 



WHEEE NUETUEE FAILS 91 

ious atmosphere, the more deeply do they 
feel the impulse to get entirely away from 
it and look at life from a wholly different 
standpoint. They cut loose from early as- 
sociations, break off good habits already 
formed, experiment with many questionable 
things ; lend a hospitable ear to theories of 
life that deny religion and ignore morality ; 
find themselves in a skeptical world, seek the 
reason for the skepticism, then share it; 
lose, for a time at least, all sympathy with 
their early Christian training, all Christian 
convictions, faith and hope. Like the 
Prodigal they go into the far country, and 
do not seem to be able to find themselves in 
any other way. When they do come to 
themselves, they are amazed and pained to 
see what a sinful self it is to which they 
have come. Innocence has been lost, and 
life is all marred with streaks of sin; bad 
habits have been formed and fixed ; ill has 
been done, and ill deserved ; henceforth 
their only hope of becoming men in whom 
the image of God may be seen lies in a 
radical, revolutionary renewal of the spirit 
of their mind. There must be a decisive 



92 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

change, a transformation, a conversion from 
an evil life. 

The point to be enforced here is that this 
type of experience is prescribed by human 
nature and provided for in the gospel as 
truly as the other. The expectation that 
Christian nurture will generally insure the 
attainment of Christian character without 
such experiences has no better ground than 
the former expectation that such experiences 
were always necessary because human na- 
ture was totally depraved. Each theory 
makes a specific type of human nature the 
exclusive one. The question whether a boy, 
brought up under Christian nurture, shall 
achieve a personal faith and character by 
gradual growth, testing his faith point by 
point until he is well assured of its validitj^ 
or by the more violent method of breaking 
with his past, finding new and often evil 
associations, trying the life of infidelity, and 
then coming back to his father's faith, if he 
ever comes at all, with a deep sense of per- 
sonal sin, is very largely a question of tem- 
perament. To some extent it may be a 
question of his treatment in youth by his 



WHERE NIJRTTJEE FAILS 93 

parents and teachers ; but fundamentally, it 
is a question of his own nature — the nature 
that God gave him and meant for his bless- 
ing, not for his loss. Certain temperaments 
are moce likelj'' to enter into a Christian life 
by the gradual steps of uneventful growth ; 
others, often the more strenuous, vigorous 
ones, must have a more stormy career, a 
more extreme experience, and enter the 
higher life by a more marked revolution. 
But both ways are right ways, both ways 
are God's ways, and neither should ever be 
lost sight of by the Church. So long as 
there are in this world men of impulsive 
natures, quick tempers, ardent, enthusiastic, 
sanguine or stormy temperaments, as well 
as men more sedate and evenly poised, so 
long must the Church give attention to the 
conversion of mature men as well as to the 
nurture of children and youth. 

It is evident that the estrangement, which 
we have seen to be a natural and essential 
feature of nature's work in the soul of youth, 
is always likely to carry those of sanguine or 
energetic temperaments into the far country 
where the Prodigal went, in spite of all that 



94 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

Christian nurture can do for them. What 
advantage, then, has the child of Christian 
nurture ? 

Much every way; but chiefly this, that 
even in the far country he still knows him- 
self to be a child of God, and says, "My 
Father." The Prodigal is by no means the 
sorriest figure in the story. Far worse 
off than he is the "citizen of that coun- 
try," who never had any other home or 
knew any better life. The life of sin is his 
native element ; to it he was born ; every 
one, himself included, always expected him 
to lead that life. Often, alas! he is per- 
fectly content with it. If he is converted, 
he must break away from all that has been 
bred into him, from all his associations, am- 
bitions and pursuits; he must learn the 
Christian ideals and ways as something 
wholly new, and come as a stranger into the 
household of the faith. The conversion of 
the Prodigal is also a turning from evil to 
righteous ways ; but it is a turning back to 
ways of righteousness familiar to his feet 
from infancy. The infinite advantage of 
the Prodigal over the far country native, 



WHEEE NUETUEE FAILS 95 

the child of Christian nurture over the child 
of the street, is that at the farthest point of 
prodigal wandering he still knows a better 
life and knows it as his true place, remem- 
bers higher ideals and a sphere where they 
are realized by his kin, has a thousand 
memories and associations that unite with 
the pleas of his friends, the prayers and 
tears of his parents, to win him back to the 
life to which he was born and of which he 
is a part. Christian nurture cannot keep all 
the boys from a prodigal's career ; but it 
does, again and again, make the difference 
between the prodigal who returns penitent 
and is saved and the wanderer who finds the 
far country to his mind and dwells there 
content. 

Some one, pleading for the children, has 
said that in time past the churches well-nigh 
reversed the saying of the Saviour, and the 
children were practically told, "Except ye 
become as grown men, and be converted, ye 
cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven." 
In our time the pendulum of thought is 
swinging to the other extreme, and there is 



96 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

danger that, with our emphasis on Christian 
nurture and early entrance into the church, 
we are about to say, in effect, to the men, 
" Even if you are converted and become as 
little children, your habits are so fixed and 
your character so settled that your chance 
of entering the kingdom of heaven is ex- 
tremely small." It will never do to forget 
that the Saviour who said, " Suffer the little 
children to come unto me, and forbid them 
not," and received and blessed the children 
two or three times in his career, made it his 
daily labor to call sinners to repentance, to 
seek and save the lost, to sit at meat with 
publicans and sinners and offer them all the 
treasures of his kingdom. Only by desert- 
ing the methods of the Master can we give 
the conversion of mature men, yes, of hard- 
ened sinners, a secondary place in our ex- 
pectations and our Christian efforts. 

Blessed are those souls that find their God 
by the smooth path of unconscious Christian 
growth, with no weary wandering in the 
ways of flagrant sin. Blessed are those 
who settle their personal relations with God 
in the happy days of youth, starting right 



WHEEE NUETUEE FAILS 97 

in life, or discovering a wrong start quickly 
and hastening back to Christ. But when 
youth has passed without a Christian experi- 
ence that leads to confession, let no man 
think that his day of grace is past. For all 
the greater experiences of life, which the 
Creator has appointed for his children, are 
designed to win them away from sin and the 
love of sin, to renew the spirit of their 
minds with a deep sense of their need of 
divine friendship and fellowship ; and if the 
spirit of a man is not set right with God in 
youth, as indeed it ought to be, then the 
heavenly Father has wisely and lovingly 
ordained all these sober years of responsi- 
bility and work, all the deep experiences of 
human love and sorrow, and these solemn 
days of age when life's work is done, to win 
men to a right and loving spirit toward him- 
self. God nurtures his children through all 
their threescore years and ten; and he 
faints not, neither is weary, when his labor 
seems in vain and thej^ wander afar from 
him; for he knows that when, at last, the 
day of repentance shall come, that man will 
love most to whom most is forgiven. 



CHAPTEE V 
The Evangelism of Jesus 

The practical interest of the investigation 
of the religious mind of youth centers in the 
question. What means and methods of Chris- 
tian work will most certainly and effectively 
promote the achievement of a Christian char- 
acter ? 

In the discussion of this matter hitherto, 
attention has been chiefly directed to two 
methods of making disciples, the method of 
the evangelist and the method of Christian 
nurture. The two methods have been set in 
sharp contrast, and the partisans of each 
have vigorously and even bitterly decried 
the other. We have just seen, however, that 
there is reason for holding that both methods 
are grounded in permanent and character- 
istic movements of the spiritual life, so that 
both are likely to continue in use with no 
real abatement of power, though with con- 
siderable abatement of expectations, when 
98 



THE EVANGELISM OF JESUS 99 

the intrinsic limitations of each are fully 
recognized. 

Serious defects are, indeed, inherent in 
both methods. The method of the evangel- 
ist has been subjected to severe criticism be- 
cause of its extreme liability to abuse. The 
revival, as we have seen, is an institution 
meant to stir the religious feelings to their 
depths with a mighty appeal to hope and 
fear and aspiration, in order to produce such 
a disturbance of the usual balance of the 
emotions that a new adjustment of the spir- 
itual life may easily come about; and it 
aims to create this disturbance in a multi- 
tude of men at once, and move them in the 
mass. It is inevitable that a method which 
thus works on all with means designed to 
move the hardened and awake the sluggish, 
should put a violent strain upon natures that 
need no such vigorous stirring, and often 
work them real and serious harm. This 
danger besets the method in the hands of 
the wisest evangelist ; and the mischief 
wrought by the unwise is past all reckoning. 
Yet the purpose to reach and arouse those 
whom less demonstrative methods fail to 



100 EDTTCATION'AL EVA^-GELISM 

touch, those mature and hardened sinners 
who are not amenable to the gentler leading 
of the ordinary means of grace, is a legitimate 
and laudable one ; and while we hope that 
the day of the illiterate, self-appointed, ob- 
streperous evangelist, with a harsh voice and 
a narrow experience and a limp Bible and a 
fund of stories and little else, is past or 
rapidly passing, we gladly recognize in the 
true evangelist of apostolic spirit a man sent 
from God, who ought to be no stranger in 
the churches. 

The method of Christian nurture is also 
open to serious criticism. Its defect is, not 
that it is abused, but that it is so little used 
as to be wholly inadequate. In the nature 
of the case, it is a method applicable only to 
a minority of each generation. It is distinct- 
ively the method of the devout family ; it 
requires a Christian home as its field, and a 
family circle richly pervaded with the spirit 
of Christ ; its most important period is the 
first three 3^ears of the child's life ; it works 
by vital forces and unconscious influences 
more than by deliberate intention and effort ; 
it requires parents to be priests to bring 



THE EVANGELISM OF JESUS 101 

their children to God, the home life to be 
the matrix to mold their souls for Christ, and 
family government to be the pattern of the 
divine order in which the child's will and 
conscience shall be gradually and almost un- 
consciously adjusted to the higher law. But 
as a matter of fact, the Christian homes that 
meet these conditions and bring forth the 
ripe fruit of Christian nurture are compara- 
tively few. Family religion is more and 
more neglected ; the family altar is a thing 
unknown in the majority even of Christian 
homes. By far the larger part of our young 
people are coming out of homes where the 
mention of personal religion is carefully 
avoided, and parental example is at best a 
divided influence ; while as for Bushnell's 
doctrine of the out-populating power of the 
Christian stock, the best that can be said is 
that there is a certain large truth in the idea 
as applied to the Christian races among the 
peoples of the world, but no apparent truth 
w^hatever in the idea that, in our land, the 
avowedly Christian families will " out-popu- 
late " those where acknowledged personal 
religion is unknown. 



102 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

And so it has come to pass that our 
churches have found both methods wanting, 
and have ceased to place their chief reliance 
for making disciples on either, or on the two 
combined. The hope of rearing children in 
Christian households to out-populate the un- 
christian families among us has vanished, if 
indeed it ever was seriously entertained. 
Yet the danger and folly of letting children 
grow up as sinners to be converted later on 
has been brought home to the conscience 
of the Church so strongly as to make it 
altogether impossible to fall back upon the 
revival method as completely as in former 
days. We have simply been forced to de- 
velop another method, making use of other 
means. 

By common consent, the churches of the 
present time have consigned both the re- 
vivalistic and the Christian nurture methods 
of winning men to a secondary place, and 
committed their chief hopes to the method 
of educational evangelism. It is indeed a 
sorry fact, but it is a fact that bulks large 
in the planning of religious work to-day, 
that the church cannot trust the home to do 



THE EVANGELISM OF JESUS 103 

its part. For this reason, there is practically 
no recognition of Christian nurture in the 
organization of religious work. No distinc- 
tion is made between the children of Chris- 
tian families and others. They are taken 
into the same classes, and given the same 
instruction and discipline. And good, ear- 
nest, sensible Christian parents, who are 
trying to do their part, are content, with 
seldom an objection, to have their children 
taught the same lessons, touched by the 
same influences, moved by the same appeals, 
as the children of unchristian homes. 

A colossal blunder, surely ! Nay, it is no 
such thing. The fact that children of such 
different antecedents are often grouped to- 
gether and given the same treatment does 
not prove that Sunday-school officers and 
teachers are blockheads without a ray of 
intelligence in ordering their work ; it 
proves that common sense has recognized 
in religious education, as in secular, a work 
of such beneficence and such dimensions that 
all children are profited by it, whatever their 
antecedents. 

The principle which lies at the foundation 



104 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

of this new conception of evangelism is, 
that' Christian character can be formed by 
education ; or, in other words, that the 
Holy Spirit can do his transforming and 
sanctifying work upon the soul through 
educational means, no less than by con- 
version on the one hand, or Christian birth 
and growth on the other. The most favored 
child of Christian lineage needs the stimulus 
of educational contact and fellowship with 
those unlike himself to develop a ripened, 
robust, well-rounded Christian character. 
And on the other hand, there is a power in 
the truth of God, educationally applied to 
the growing soul, to counteract the worst 
possible heredity and home environment ; 
for have we not all seen those who came 
out of the worst conditions, children with 
every human reason to be spoiled and ruined, 
growing up to a pure, strong, consecrated 
manhood and womanhood, without ever 
knowing an hour of true Christian nurture, 
nor yet any marked experience of con- 
version ? If we can effect a real contact 
of the child's mind with the truth of Jesus, 
and, even for an hour now and then, bathe 



THE EVANGELISM OF JESUS 105 

his spirit in the spirit of Jesus, there can be 
formed in him a Christian character against 
which hell shall not prevail, though en- 
trenched in his own home. 

Much has been said and written of late 
about " the new evangelism." Far and wide 
Christian people are entertaining such 
thoughts as these : — Revivals are no longer 
popular ; protracted meetings have reached 
an end ; the itinerant evangelist is less effect- 
ive than he was — where is the Whitefield 
or Finney or Moody to move the masses to- 
day ? The minister who trusts to occasional 
awakenings for the gathering of the harvest 
is voted a failure ; the church so dead as to 
need reviving is recreant to its work. But 
while we mourn the waning of the old 
evangelism, we hear the acclamations that 
proclaim the rising of the new. If the old 
way is dying, let it die ; a new has been 
born, and " God fulfills himself in many 
ways, lest one good custom should corrupt 
the world." The new evangelism works by 
means of Sunday-schools, Young People's 
Societies, catechetical classes, and pastors' 
meetings with the young ; it studies psychol- 



106 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

ogy and pedagogy, investigates the mind 
of the child, the phenomena of adolescence, 
the spiritual nature of the mature man in 
normal and pathological conditions ; it works 
quietly, but with a purpose that is deep and 
broad and long — it knows how to wait as 
well as work ; it avoids excitement and dis- 
play, trusting the still small voice to do 
more for the salvation of souls than blatant 
advertising ; it honors all the services of the 
church, all the religion of the home, as 
means of making disciples of Christ, and 
seeks to supplement them, not by anything 
extraordinary and sensational, but by healthy 
and constant personal influence. A few ac- 
cessions at each communion of the church, or 
a goodly class once a year, are the ideal aimed 
at ; and when a church does report large 
numbers added to its membership, it is 
common now to add that there have been 
no appeals to the emotions, no special meet- 
ings, no artificial methods, often no helpers 
for the minister except the people of his own 
congregation. 

Perhaps such language is too explicit, for 
popular thought about the new evangelism 



THE EVANGELISM OF JESUS 107 

is nebulous, and the movement itself is, like 
infant movements generally, vague and un- 
certain, with many clutches at the moon. 
But two things are perfectly clear to all : 
there is a widespread loss of confidence in 
the evangelistic methods of the past ; and 
there is an insistent demand for an effective 
system of religious education. One who 
meditates with penetration on these two 
facts will be convinced that the new 
evangelism has the breath of life in it, and 
a great future before it. 

For it will be plain to him that all true 
evangelism must be educational. Education 
is the development of the inner capacities of 
the soul. It is not possible, declares Presi- 
dent Butler, of Columbia College, '' for us 
ever again to identify education with mere 
acquisition of learning. ... It must mean 
a gradual adjustment to the spiritual 
possessions of the race." But the adjust- 
ment of life to the spiritual realities with 
which men have to do is precisely the work 
of evangelism. Just as every intellectual 
discipline assumes and addresses the capacity 
of the soul for thought, so evangelism as- 



108 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

sumes and addresses its capacity for God. 
The evangelism that fails to meet the edu- 
cational test, that merely offers men some- 
thing from without and seeks to elicit noth- 
ing from within, is not adapted to the 
nature of the soul that it would save or 
fitted for the work that it undertakes to do. 
Missionaries have always learned this by ex- 
perience; and since St. Paul taught daily for 
two years in the school of Tyrannus, they 
have never been the ones to put asunder the 
evangelistic appeal and the educational de- 
velopment. 

It will also be plain that the new evangel- 
ism, in its effort to work out an effective edu- 
cational system for winning souls to God, is 
a return to the method of the Master. Jesus 
was both preacher and teacher; but his 
purpose was one ; all his teaching was 
evangelistic, all his preaching educational. 
As the Church approaches the method of 
Jesus in dealing with men, its evangelism 
will certainly become more educational, its 
efforts at religious education more pro- 
foundly evangelistic. 

Consider the evangelism of Jesus. He 



THE EVANGELISM OF JESUS 109 

proceeds upon the assumption that the 
kingdom of God is native to every human 
soul. He said, " The kingdom of God is 
within you." He dealt with men upon that 
basis. He sought, not to impart to human 
nature something that does not inherently 
belong to it, but to bring forward into 
clear consciousness and fruitful activity the 
higher potentialities of the soul. Says 
Browning in Paracelsus : 

** Truth is within ourselves ; it takes no rise 
From outward things, whate'er you may believe. 
There is an inmost center in us all, 
Where truth abides in fulness; and around. 
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, 
This perfect, clear perception — which is truth. 
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh 
Binds it, and makes all error : and, to KNOW, 
Rather consists in opening out a way 
Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, 
Than in effecting entry for a light 
Supposed to be without. ' ' 

What Browning here says of truth and 
knowledge, we understand Jesus to say of 
character and salvation. The very word 
salvation implies the native richness and 
worth of the soul that is to be saved. 



110 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

From our standpoint, the problem of 
bringing souls to God shapes itself this 
way : How shall the spiritual powers now 
dormant in the soul of the child or lying in 
helpless incarceration behind dense walls of 
worldliness and selfishness and sensuality in 
the mature sinner, find their way forth into 
light and activity ? How shall man's capac- 
ity for conformity to the will of God be 
set free to realize itself in action ? How 
shall a way be made through the grossness 
and sordidness of the sinner's character 
for the imprisoned splendor of his nobler 
powers to come forth ? 

The evangelism of Jesus is our answer to 
these questions. He knew what was in 
man. He understood the human soul. 
With the instinct of religious genius, he 
anticipated those insights into psycholog- 
ical law which have come to common men 
only after long and patient research. There- 
fore, modern science does homage to the 
method of the Master, seeing that its latest 
discoveries are but his primary principles. 
By way of illustration, rather than of ex- 
haustive analysis, we may show how the 



THE EVANGELISM OF JESUS 111 

evangelism of Jesus proceeded on three 
psychological principles that have, in recent 
years, come to be recognized as fundamental 
in all educational work. 

The first of these is Suggestion. Professor 
Baldwin tells us that Suggestion in psy- 
chology means that all sorts of hints from 
without disturb and modifv the beliefs and 
actions of the individual. He might have 
added that these hints do a large part of 
their work below the line of consciousness. 
For instance, a certain position in a certain 
little bed suggests sleep to a child ; put him 
in that place and position, and in a little 
while, never thinking of sleep but counting 
his fingers or crooning a song, he falls asleep. 
Sometimes a tune keeps running in your 
head and you cannot imagine where it came 
from ; note its time, and you will probably 
find that it was unconsciously started by a 
knock at the door, or the regular beating of 
your heart, or some other rhythmic move- 
ment or sound that had not fixed your at- 
tention. 

Now the Incarnation, that is, the presence 



112 EDUCATIOIJ'AL EVANGELISM 

of Jesus as the realized ideal of manhood in 
the world, is the permanent Suggestion of 
the higher life for man. It works this way : 
Christ came into the world and lived a fault- 
less life. Before him there had been theories, 
visions, ideals of the perfect life; he made 
the ideal a practical reality in the person of 
a flesh-and-blood man. Between him and 
other ideals there is the difference between 
the actual and the imaginary. To see him, 
therefore, awakens irresistible thought in a 
man of what he himself may be. Christ, 
coming into the field of his consciousness as 
a real person, not a dream, is the strongest 
conceivable suggestion of the possibilities of 
his own personality. This suggestion, work- 
ing even subconsciously, sets at work the 
forces which shape his character into the 
likeness of Christ. It is maintained by 
good authority, that it is the cherishing of an 
ideal that gives unity to our consciousness. 
We know ourselves in and by our ideal of 
ourselves. If this be true, how incalculable 
is the formative power of the incarnate 
Christ as the ideal of manhood constantly 
present with men in a Christian land, even 



THE EVANGELISM OF JESUS 113 

in spite of themselves. It sets even the sub- 
conscious activities of the soul at work 
making men Christlike. 

The doctrine of the new birth receives 
confirmation and illustration from the work- 
ings of psychologic suggestion. The higher 
possibilities of the soul lie dormant and do 
not attempt to " open out a way " until they 
are aroused from without; that is, until 
something seen or heard or felt suggests the 
exercise of these powers. To illustrate from 
lower ground, the instinct of fear is native 
to every one ; nobody could ever be made 
afraid of anj^thing if the instinct of fear were 
not in him ; but on the other hand, the in- 
stinct of fear never awakens until some sug- 
gestion of fear comes to the mind from 
without ; the child does not know what fear 
is until all at once something frightful awak- 
ens the sleeping instinct. Likewise the in- 
stinct of motherhood was doubtless a pri- 
mary endowment of the first woman ; but it 
never awoke until there was a child to be 
mothered. The instinct of love resides in 
the inmost sanctuary of each soul, but only 
comes forth when an object of love is found. 



114 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

So the divine life implanted by the Creator 
in the soul of man lies slumbering there un- 
til it is awakened by the presentation of the 
divine in Christ ; his appearance is the sug- 
gestion that awakens it, and the response of 
the soul to this suggestion, the coming forth 
of the highest in us to meet the perfect in 
Christ, is the new birth, the spiritual awak- 
ening ; it is regeneration by the Holy Spirit. 

The second great psychological principle 
on which Jesus works is that of Imitation. 
Imitation is a fact as old as mankind ; its 
psychological meaning has only recently 
been investigated. Parents always knew 
that children were mimics ; it is only very 
recently that the immense importance of 
imitation in the development of the soul has 
been recognized. When a child imitates, he 
is doing nothing less than building his soul ; 
he is literally making himself. He is calling 
forth his soul to self-realization by means of 
his likeness to that which he imitates. He 
is enlarging his self-consciousness to include 
that of the dog or the horse or the man that 
he mimics. He is finding that he is a self, 



THE EVANGELISM OP JESUS 115 

and that selfhood is essentially the same in 
him and in other persons. By his imitative 
games he builds into his soul an appreciation 
of the nature and value of the various trades 
and occupations, and learns to handle the 
materials of life as a master. 

As we read the Gospels, it strikes us that 
imitation was the main reliance of Jesus, 
the fundamental and abiding method of his 
kingdom. God sent his Son in the flesh 
that men might have true " copy " to imi- 
tate ; and one deep tone, thrilling through 
all the music of Jesus' words, is that which 
bids men be like him. Walking by the Sea 
of Galilee, he called his first disciples with 
the words, " Follow me " ; and when all his 
teaching and training of his followers were 
completed, and, after the experience of death 
and resurrection, he stood again by the Sea 
of Galilee restoring the fallen fisherman, 
his farewell word to Simon Peter was, 
" Follow thou me." To be a Christian is to 
follow Christ; Christianity is just the imi- 
tation of Christ. The child by imitation of 
those whom he sees about him, builds his 
personality from the copy thus presented. 



116 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

Even so we build our souls after the pattern 
presented in Christ. By conscious, resolute 
striving to be like him, we make his con- 
sciousness of fellowship with God, his con- 
formity to the will of God, the reality of 
our inner lives. He is the Way ; it is by 
imitating him that we open out a path on 
which the inner splendors of our souls may 
come forth. 

The third great psychological principle in 
the Master's method of evangelism is that 
of education through Apperception of truth. 

That the purpose of education is to call 

forth the native powers of the soul into the 

world of action, to open out a way for the' 

imprisoned splendor to escape, is a familiar 

truism ; but it is also true that this high 

purpose is often lost from view in teaching. 

^' We teaoh and teach, 
Until like drumming pedagogues, we lose 
The thought that what we teach has higher ends 
Than being taught and learned." 

The educational world has lately been 
much concerned with the doctrine of apper- 
ception. Apperception is a word to conjure 
with in these days. It really means noth- 



THE EVANGELISM OF JESUS 117 

ing, as Professor James tells us in his " Talks 
to Teachers," but the way in which an idea 
is taken into the mind ; only, we must add, 
the doctrine of apperception has wholly 
changed our conception of the way in which 
an idea is taken into the mind. It used to 
be thought that when an idea was presented 
to the mind, the perceptive faculty laid hold 
of it, and passed it over to the memory for 
safe-keeping. Now it is known that no idea 
is ever taken into the mind that way ; a 
new idea does not find lodgment in the 
mind until the act of perception is followed 
by apperception ; that is, until the new idea 
is set in relation with the other contents of 
the mind. Ideas are social, never isolated 
individuals ; there is no such creature at 
large in the world as a man of one idea. 
No new idea can be imparted to the mind 
unless a " whole troop of ideas already pres- 
ent come forth to welcome it." What thus 
comes forth to welcome the new idea is 
often more important than that idea itself. 
The educational value of truth lies just in 
its power to call forth this response from 
within the soul. The educational value of 



118 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

any particular truth to any particular soul is 
here. To a mind just learning to count 
with numbers, the truth of ratio as ex- 
pressed in the rule of three has no educa- 
tional value, because there are no ideas in 
the mind ready to make friends and keep 
company with this new one. At a later 
time, when the properties of numbers are a 
little better understood, the truth of ratio 
will be educative, because it will be wel- 
comed into the mind, associated with 
thoughts already there, and so understood. 
Education through apperception of truth 
means that the soul is developed, not by the 
impartation of truth as something from 
without, foreign to the mind, but by the re- 
sponse of the soul from within to the truth 
that is offered. 

Now a review of the teaching and preach- 
ing of Jesus shows that he fully compre- 
hended this principle, and worked upon it. 
He was never satisfied merely to declare the 
truth, nor did he have his followers repeat 
his statements of it after him until they 
were memorized. He strove in every way 
to get the truth understood, or apperceived. 



THE EVANGELISM OF JESUS 119 

He always sought to make connection be- 
tween the new truth and the former con- 
tents of his hearers' minds. When he spoke 
the Beatitudes, he dovetailed them into the 
experiences of lowliness, sorrow and thirst 
for righteousness that were present in the 
minds of his disciples. When he interpreted 
the duties of his kingdom, he grappled his 
interpretation fast to the idea of law with 
which they were familiar. When he would 
impart a conception of the spiritual proc- 
esses of his kingdom, he pointed to the 
well-known figure of the sower in the field, 
or to the woman with the measure of meal, 
or to the fishermen drawing the net. In all 
his teaching — difficult, highly spiritual, di- 
vinely mysterious as portions of it are — 
there is everywhere the effort to secure the 
apperception of the truth, to get his ideas 
yoked together with the common stock-ideas 
current in the minds of men. 

That is why the gospel is the supreme 
educational force in history. Men have 
always wonderingly testified to the match- 
less power of the gospel to draw out 
the higher powers of the soul. Here is the 



120 educatio:n^al evangelism 

reason. The gospel is educative because its 
Teacher put its truths before men in a form 
to be apperceived, to become not a part of 
man's mental store, but a part of his mental 
life. The words of Plato are a priceless 
treasure, but the words of Jesus are spirit and 
are life. The gospel is pure sunshine, draw- 
ing out what is in the soul as the sunlight 
draws the plant out of the seed beneath the 
soil ; out through the hard shell of the seed, 
up through the dark soil, the tender shoot 
pushes its way at the behest of the mighty 
sun ; so through the shell of a hardened 
heart, through dark masses of habits of sin, 
the spiritual life of man shoots forth in re- 
sponse to the gospel presented in Christ, 
coming forth from its prison to display its 
native splendor and worth, to blossom and 
flourish and bear fruit. 

If we but understand him, we shall see 
that all the significant insights of modern 
psychology and pedagogy into the needs of 
the growing soul were anticipated by our 
Lord. And the conviction on which the 
new evangelism must base all its work is 
that the method which Jesus, in the days of 



THE EVANGELISM OF JESUS 121 

his incarnation, used for bringing men to 
God is the permanent method. The pres- 
ence of the church (or, rather, of the Church) 
in a community, with its unceasing witness 
to the Master and his ideals, is the ever- 
present Suggestion to men of the higher life 
of the soul. Jesus himself, as presented by 
the Church in its teaching, and, more faintly 
but more vitally, in the lives of its members, 
is the perpetual object of imitation ; the 
" Follow me " of Jesus is still the way to God. 
And the teaching of the Church, its preach- 
ing of the Word, its worship and sacra- 
ments, are abiding educational forces by 
which the truth is offered to men and elicits 
from their souls that response which brings 
out all that is best within. There may be 
many types of evangelism, many plans for 
bringing men to God ; but the evangelism 
that follows Jesus must always be educa- 
tional. Whatever form it may take, in gos- 
pel tent or stately cathedral, it never loses 
faith in the kingdom of God within the soul 
of man, or in the gospel of Jesus Christ as 
the power to bring that kingdom forth in 
splendid realization. 



122 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

Educational evangelism holds that the gos- 
pel is not simply a message to men, but a 
power to generate righteousness in their souls 
and develop godliness from within ; seeks not 
merely to tell men of Christ, but to build 
Christ himself — his consciousness of God, 
his union with the will of God — into the 
personality of men ; is not content to be 
forever repeating the angels' song of peace 
on earth among men of good will, but says 
with St. Paul, " My little children, of whom 
I am again in travail until Christ be formed 
in you " ; understands its mission to be not 
only to proclaim the good news of Christ, 
but, by applying its good news as a compel- 
ling, formative, educative power to the soul, 
to fashion the men of the world into the 
image of Christ. This is an ideal, at once of 
evangelism and of religious education, which 
Jesus set forth in his practice, which the 
scientific interpretation of the nature of the 
soul and the meaning of the gospel for it 
supports, and which the Church is coming in 
our time more clearly to see, and more 
widely, deliberately and joyfully to accept. 



CHAPTER YI 
Personal Adjustment 

One of the profound convictions in which 
modern thought has resulted is that the 
only way of well-being for any creature 
whatsoever lies through felicitous adapta- 
tion to its proper environment. Another 
conviction equally assured is that the life of 
a human being, with all its varied interests 
and activities, here and hereafter, forms a 
unity. Human well-being, therefore, re- 
quires the adaptation of men to their envi- 
ronment, and permanent well-being requires 
a complete and final adaptation of the total 
man to his ultimate environment. 

What does salvation mean to men whose 
thoughts are cast in the most modern mold ? 
To the practical man, to-day as always, sal- 
vation is the reformation of the outward 
life : — the prodigal forsakes his wanton wan- 
dering and returns home ; the wicked man 
123 



124 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

ceases to do evil and learns to do well ; the 
one who stole steals no more, but makes 
reparation ; the hateful liar learns to speak 
the truth in love, and profane lips to utter 
the Holy Name in prayer ; the stiff-necked 
infidel bows in worship, the scoffer becomes 
a learner, and the one who reviled the exer- 
cises of religion leaves his evil companions 
and goes rejoicingly to the sanctuary on the 
Lord's Day. To the mystic of to-day, sal- 
vation is an inward experience of indescri- 
bable delight, an inward peace, a transport of 
spiritual devotion, a bathing of the spirit in 
a sea of love, a rapturous assurance that we 
are in the hands of the Eternal who is our 
Friend, and whose friendliness is our pledge 
of all blessedness now and forever. To the 
theologian, now as ever, salvation is a divine 
intervention to rescue helpless sinners from 
a hopeless fate, the doing of a work which 
men could not do, a work of infinite mercy 
divinely brought to completion at Calvary, 
and being progressively developed in its ef- 
fects upon men by the agency of the Holy 
Spirit in the hearts of all who are being 
saved. 



PERSONAL ADJUSTMENT 125 

But reflective men of the present, whose 
thinking, whether they will or not, is pro- 
foundly influenced by the evolutionary phi- 
losophy, are likely, in the effort to apprehend 
the reality for which the name stands, to 
conceive of salvation in other terms. The 
truth of the practical, mystical and theolog- 
ical views is not called in question ; but an- 
other view is found to satisfy our waj^s of 
thinking bettei*. In this view, which may 
be called the psychological, attention is con- 
centrated upon what takes place within the 
soul itself that is being saved. It has been 
said that Carlyle wrote history from a point 
of view within the actors ; the effort of much 
recent thought with regard to salvation is 
precisely to get this interior view, and de- 
scribe the inward human reality of the proc- 
ess that sets a man right with God. 

Viewed thus, salvation is seen to be the 
attainment by a human being of his final 
welfare by a proper adjustment of his entire 
nature to his total environment. The re- 
ligious problem, therefore, the same for all 
ages but acutely accentuated in youth, is a 
problem in personal adjustment. 



126 EDUCATIONAL EVAKGELISM 

The supreme task at which Nature re- 
quires the youth to labor is the adjustment 
of his personal life to the world-life. What- 
ever birth, heredity and training may have 
done or not done for him, the imperious re- 
quirement of life is that he shall make this 
adjustment himself, or at the least personally 
ratify what has been done. The work ap- 
pears in many phases ; the intellectual ac- 
tivities of youth have for their supreme object 
the adjustment of the mind to the world of 
truth ; the efforts of the boy to find his 
work point to the adjustment of his life to 
the economic order, his friendships and love- 
making to his adjustment in the social order ; 
the interest of the moral life of youth is 
likewise chiefly in the discovery of a fitting 
adjustment to the moral order, while religion 
is the feeling of the soul after its abiding- 
place in the Father's house. Like a piece of 
intricate machinery, a human life can run 
smoothly and effectively only when it is 
properly adjusted ; there are many adjust- 
ments to make, and the tragedies that come 
from maladjustment are numberless. 

The commonest mistake of all is that of 



PEESONAL ADJUSTMENT 127 

supposing that a partial and temporary 
adjustment of life is a complete and final 
one ; as when a man is perfectly satisfied 
with himself if his life has got itself so 
fitted into the economic order that he is 
making money, or a woman has no plans for 
her life beyond the four walls of a happy 
home. Tor home and business, truth and 
right, economic and social systems, are but 
subordinate parts of a larger whole. We 
name this larger whole, which is the ulti- 
mate environment of man's life, the divine 
order. It is to this that he must adjust 
himself before a continuing blessedness can 
be assured him. The divine order is a su- 
preme system which includes all that can 
affect human welfare, and organizes all 
things material and spiritual for the ulti- 
mate good of man. Until the adjustment 
of the personal life to this order is settled, 
nothing is settled. If a true and correct 
adjustment is made here, all is ready for a 
true and correct adjustment in every subor- 
dinate relation. The proper adjustment of 
life to this highest order is therefore man's 
first concern, and the ancient claim of 



128 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

primacy for religion among human interests 
stands unmoved. 

Salvation, then, in terms agreeable to 
modern thinking, is the fitting and per- 
manent adjustment of a human soul to the 
divine order that envelops all life ; the soul 
that has found such adjustment is saved, 
here and hereafter ; no other is. Or, to put 
the matter in another way, salvation is the 
making of a man into an effective personal- 
ity through adjustment to those fundamental 
conditions of real effectiveness which are 
all summed up in the phrase '' the will of 
God." Every soul is a center of personal 
energy, an original cause. The well-being 
of the soul depends upon its profitable and 
effective use of its inherent energy. A lost 
soul is one whose energy is dissipated and 
ineffective ; a saved soul one that is realizing 
the full measure of its personal effectiveness 
within the eternal order, freely and effi- 
ciently applying its energy to a work that 
will have at the last a permanent worth for 
God. 

Such effectiveness of personality is pos- 
sible for a finite being only when the per- 



PEESONAL ADJUSTMENT 129 

sonality has found its fitting place and full 
adjustment within the total order or system 
of which its life is a little fraction. And 
since it is the effectiveness of a free person 
that is contemplated, the necessary adjust- 
ment to the divine order must be a free, 
personal self -adjustment. Hence results 
the conflict between human freedom and 
divine authority, and the appearance of 
maladjustment as a struggle of personal 
human will against the will of God. Hence 
it follows also that the true resolution of 
this discord is man's free acceptance for 
himself of the divine authority. For only 
he is free who is in harmonious adjustment 
with his environment ; no human power is 
effective unless it works in line with the 
superior powers ; the soul is liberated only 
by conformity to its world ; its energies are 
set free, personal character made effective, 
salvation realized, only by its willing ad- 
aptation of itself to the requirements of the 
eternal laws. 

This is the paradox of the gospel. The 
souPs liberation for effective living can be 
accomplished only through self-renunciation 



130 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

and the acceptance of a Master ; for his 
mastery is not restraint or bondage, but 
support and strength. 

*' Oh, where is the sea ? " the fishes cried, 

As they swam the crystal clearness through ; 
** We've heard from of old of the ocean's tide 
And we long to look on the waters blue. 
The wise ones speak of an infinite sea ; 
Oh, who can tell us if such there be? '^ 

The lark flew up in the morning bright, 
And sang and balanced on sunny wings ; 

And this was its song ; " I see the light ; 
I look on a world of beautiful things ; 

And flying and singing everywhere 

In vain I have sought to find the air.^^ 

What the water is to the fishes and the 
air to the lark, the spiritual order repre- 
sented by Jesus Christ is to the soul of 
man ; only men may not remain so bliss- 
fully unconscious of their environment, and 
" whosoever would save his life shall lose 
it : and whosoever shall lose his life for my 
sake shall find it " is the law of spiritual 
adaptation to environment which, in some 
form or other, must be obeyed by every 
soul that becomes an effective spiritual per- 
sonality and is saved. 



PEESOiSTAL ADJUSTMENT 131 

JSTothing less than the happy adjustment 
of the total life of man to its ultimate 
environment can satisfy the conditions of 
man's well-being ; nothing less can be salva- 
tion. It must be admitted that salvation 
so conceived is likely to appear to some 
practical-minded persons as a somewhat 
misty and remote concern. The actual, 
practical endeavor with which we are com- 
monly employed is to adjust ourselves 
to the world of custom and convention in 
which we happen to live, to make ourselves 
effective and successful in that sphere of 
practical activity in which our w^ork is 
done. Yet at this point we are to recall a 
marked feature of youth's estrangement — 
the rebellion of so many young people 
against conventions, their demand for a 
better reason than custom, w^hich is, in 
effect, a demand to know the true order. 
By whatever terms we may express it, the 
fact beneath the experiences of spiritual 
and moral unrest in youth, and the distress 
and longings of seekers after salvation in 
later years, is the demand of the soul for 
right adjustment to that order of life which is 



132 EDUCATIONAL EVAI^GELISM 

actually supreme and diviue, an adjustment 
that shall be final for time and eternity, and 
so bring peace and permanent satisfaction 
to the soul. 

If, then, salvation is a free, full, final, 
personal adjustment to the divine order, it 
is manifest that in securing it the personal 
will is the paramount factor. Let other 
factors work with what force they may, the 
problem of the soul's salvation remains at 
center forever the same — to get men freely, 
willingly, gladly, to surrender themselves to 
the direction of a higher power; or, more 
concretely, to submit themselves to the 
Lordship of Christ. By whatever path a 
man may approach salvation, he will find it 
at last in a glad, energetic choice and appro- 
priation of Christ and his character as his 
highest good in time and eternity, a choice 
that differs from mere reluctant consent to 
the truth and acknowledgment of duty as 
the sunlight differs from a flickering candle 
flame. That adjustment of life which brings 
it into line with God's, order may be pro- 
moted by a thousand influences more or less 
effective, but it must be brought about at 



PEESONAL ADJUSTMENT 133 

last by the decisive action of the man's own 
will. 

What are we to do to help children, 
youths and men to make that decisive 
choice? Since adjustment to the divine 
order must be made by act of will, how are 
we to go about it to win the wills of men 
for God ? The modern psychology of the 
will offers a significant suggestion. 

The first proposition of recent psychology 
is that the soul in all its processes and mani- 
festations acts as a unit. Beginning with 
the facts of consciousness and making crit- 
ical observations of the changes that occur 
as sensations, thoughts, reasonings, passions 
and purposes go streaming through the mind, 
the most rigid analysis fails to divide the 
soul. The soul is not cellular in structure, 
is not made up of parts, great or small. The 
old psychology mapped out the geography 
of the soul, as it were, in the belief that the 
different faculties unite to constitute the 
mind somewhat as the different States unite 
to make up the Union. It was a fascinating 
analogy which found various faculties in the 



134 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

soul to do diflferent things, as the body has 
eyes to see, ears to hear, and feet to walk. 
But present-day psychology has utterly aban- 
doned this ground. The study of conscious- 
ness reveals no such division of function. 
There is one field of consciousness, and only 
one — in normal persons. And in this field 
of consciousness there is just one actor ; one 
indivisible personal soul that throws him- 
self as a whole into all his acts of perceiv- 
ing, remembering, reasoning, feeling and the 
like. It is not memory that remembers, but 
the soul; it is not reason that argues, but 
the soul ; it is not imagination that con- 
structs, but the soul ; it is not the will that 
decrees action, but the soul. The soul him- 
self attends to all of these functions, dele- 
gating nothing to subordinate agents. 

The bearing of this upon the problem of 
winning the will is plain. The will never 
acts alone ; and the attempt to win the will 
without convincing the reason and satisfy- 
ing the heart is vain. Whatever the free- 
dom of the will may mean, it is certain that 
acts of will are never independent of other 
mental processes. The intellectual, emo- 



PEESONAL ADJUSTMENT 135 

tional and volitional activities of the soul 
can be separated in thought, and must, for 
scientific clearness of understanding, be dis- 
tinguished ; actually, they coexist and are 
inseparable. Neither ideas alone, nor feel- 
ings alone, nor volitions alone, ever have 
exclusive possession of the field of conscious- 
ness. Every act of will is conditioned by 
all the thoughts and feelings present to the 
mind, and by the tendencies, prejudices and 
habits that have become characteristic of 
the individual. The appeal to the will, 
therefore, must be an appeal to the whole 
mental and spiritual organization, the entire 
soul. 

Just what is needed to secure right ac-' 
tion of the personal will appears more 
clearly from these quotations from Pro- 
fessor James' popular " Talks to Teachers." 
" All our deeds were considered by the early 
psychologists to be due to a peculiar faculty 
called the will, without whose fiat action 
could not occur. Thoughts, impressions, be- 
ing intrinsically inactive, were supposed to 
produce conduct only through the inter- 
mediation of this superior agent. Until 



136 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

they twitched its coat-tails, so to speak, no 
outward behavior could occur. . . . The 
fact is, there is no sort of consciousness 
whatever, be it sensation, feeling or idea, 
which does not directly and of itself tend 
to discharge into some motor effect. . . . 
A belief as fundamental as any in modern 
psychology, is the belief at last attained, 
that conscious processes of any sort, con- 
scious processes merely as such, mitst pass 
over into motion, open or concealed." The 
problem of right choice, then, is simply to 
find and bring to the fore the right idea. 
Sometimes the mind is hostile to that idea 
when found, dislikes to entertain it, and a 
resolute effort of voluntary attention is re- 
quired to drag it into the focus of the field 
of consciousness and keep it there long 
enough for its effects to be secured. Once 
brought, however, in this way to the center 
of the field, and held there, the reasonable 
idea will exert those effects inevitably, auto- 
matically ; for the laws of connection be- 
tween our consciousness and our nervous 
system provide for the action then taking 
place. "If then, you are asked, In what 



PEESONAL ADJUSTMENT 137 

does a moral act consist, when reduced to 
its simplest and most elementary form ? you 
can make only one reply. You can say 
that it consists in the effort of attention by 
which we hold fast to an idea which but 
for that effort of attention would be driven 
out of the mind by the other psychological 
tendencies there. To think, in short, is the 
secret of will." 

The immediate connection between ideas 
and actions, thus established by modern 
psychology, is of the first importance for 
evangelism. It was formerly believed that 
thoughts arouse feelings and feelings appeal 
to the will as motives for action. That 
psychology was responsible for the preach- 
ing — and the still more feebly sentimental 
teaching — that depends upon emotional ap- 
peals for its effect upon the will. But feel- 
ing is not now regarded by psychologists as 
a consequent of thought and an antecedent 
of action, but as an accompaniment of both. 
Feeling is the mind's appreciation of its 
own activities or states, and it is just as 
true that we feel because we act as that we 
act because w^e feel. Feeling has no more 



138 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

immediate power over the will than thought, 
since every idea tends of itself to become 
an act without waiting for any mediation 
whatsoever. 

The act of will by which a life is brought 
into adjustment to the will of God is not 
different in its essential features from the 
simplest ideomotor discharge. It is not to 
be conceived as a mighty effort of the self- 
determining faculty under stress of intense 
emotional excitement awakened by the 
sanctions with which some such appeal as 
" Choose you this day whom ye will serve " 
is enforced, but as the automatic conse- 
quence of voluntary attention given to the 
idea of personal fellowship with God until 
that idea has become winning, dominant, 
masterful. "Whence it follows, as a regula- 
tive principle for evangelism, that the sal- 
vation of human souls is to be promoted 
chiefly by getting religious ideas into the 
focus of attention. The task of the preacher 
or the teacher who would win the wills of 
men is to get the right idea of personal re- 
lation with God into the focus of their con- 
sciousness, and hold it there until it pro- 



PEESONAL ADJUSTMENT 139 

duces the desired action. It is all a matter 
of sustained interest and attention. What 
people may feel is a question that may be 
left entirely out of consideration. Of course 
they will feel, and feel deeply, when great 
thoughts are adequately set before them ; 
but they will act, not because of what they 
feel, but because the right idea of action 
has been held in the focus of their minds 
until the action becomes inevitable. The 
true preaching to the will is the preaching 
of ideas; or, better, the preaching of one 
idea at a time until the work of that idea is 
done. The effective preacher is not the one 
who moves his congregation to smiles or 
tears most readily, but the one who succeeds 
in grappling an idea drawn from the Word 
of God into the minds of his hearers, inter- 
locking it with the ideas already there so 
that it becomes a permanent element of the 
mental life. Ideas so implanted determine 
conduct and character, and the preaching 
that effects this, accomplishes the one thing 
needful. 

Our conception of the decisive act of will 
as the automatic result of ideas dominant in 



140 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

the mind is in no way modified by consider- 
ation of those cases of instantaneous con- 
version which are so impressive a feature 
of the history of religion, or of those other 
cases of prolonged struggles terminated at 
last by a single act of conscious volition. 
For the suddenness of the final issue does 
not prove the absence of that brooding over 
the ideas of religion which would normally 
result in such action. It is beyond a doubt 
that such brooding often takes place sub- 
consciously. Ideas once lodged in the mind 
sink out of sight ; but they disappear like 
seeds, to burst forth again with the surpris- 
ing power of new life. A sudden conver- 
sion, or the sudden settling of a question 
long debated, is to be attributed, not to a 
simple, sheer, heroic decision, but to the 
sudden discovery of the full meaning and 
power of an idea perhaps long present to 
the mind, but hitherto disregarded. The re- 
sult appears instantaneously, as a precipitate 
appears in a clear liquid the instant a cer- 
tain chemical reagent is introduced ; but as 
there is no precipitate unless the substance 
to form it is already there, although held in 



PEESONAL ADJUSTMENT 141 

invisible solution, so there can be no con- 
version unless the soul has been made ready 
for it by the presence of specific religious 
ideaSo 

If a man is to act as a child of God, he 
must begin by thinking of himself as a child 
of God. It is in the effort of thought re- 
quired to hold such an idea before the mind 
that men exercise " the will to believe." In 
order that the idea may work its appropriate 
result ; in order, for example, that the idea 
of a public confession of Christ may result 
in an actual confession of faith in him, it is 
usually necessary for the idea to be held 
prominently before the mind, to the exclu- 
sion of hostile and unsympathetic ideas, for 
a considerable period of time. Here is the 
psychological reason that makes special sea- 
sons of religious interest desirable. So oc- 
cupied are people with other things, that it 
is exceedingly difficult to secure effective 
attention to religious matters unless they 
are set forth as the special subject for a 
given season. Hence, one day in seven is 
reserved as a time of rest from worldly 
work, and thought on sacred themes ; hence, 



142 EDtJCATIOKAL EVANGELISM 

churches endeavor, by the observance of 
Lent, and the Week of Prayer, by holding 
revival meetings, by appointing Decision 
Days, and similar methods, to secure con- 
tinuous attention to the main ideas of relig- 
ion until suitable action follows. 

Such seasons are also agreeable to that 
law of the mind which decrees that intereft, 
especially the collective interest of the com- 
munity, shall come and go in waves. Waves 
of unusual religious interest are to be ex- 
pected, just because religion is one of the 
concerns to which the minds of men return 
again and again. But when such a wave 
comes, religious leaders do well to remember 
that its value lies wholly in its effectiveness 
in fixing attention upon religious ideas. 
Except as it promotes earnest, sober, per- 
sonal thought, it is likely to do more harm 
than good. No appeal is to be tolerated to 
anything less than the whole religious na- 
ture of men. The only converts worth hav- 
ing are those whose minds are satisfied as 
fully as their hearts. When revivalists learn 
to take advantage of these seasons of excep- 
tional interest, not to appeal to the emotions 



PEESONAL ADeTUSTMENT 143 

and harrow the souls of men, or to urge, 
threaten or cajole them into "taking a 
stand " under the unusual pressure of the 
time, but to bring before their minds in the 
most winning way the richest, loftiest, 
sweetest truths of our religion, that they 
may come under the sway of splendid ideas 
and eternal verities, there will be fewer 
backsliders among the converts, and less 
ground for objection to revivals as a method 
of seeking to save souls. 

But the unmistakable conclusion to which 
this line of thought points is that the most 
significant work that can be done to pro- 
mote the salvation of men is the work of 
him who furnishes the young mind with its 
ideas of religion. The truths of the gospel, 
inwrought into the mind by methods that 
are in essence educational, are more efficacious 
in winning the wills of men than any other 
instruments whatever. This is the secret of 
the enormous power in all times of the faith- 
ful teaching and the instructive preaching 
of the Word of God. Christian culture, as 
distinguished from Christian nurture, is the 



144 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

work of holding before the minds of children, 
youths and men the essential truths of the 
Christian religion, in the confidence that 
these truths, when actually received into the 
minds of the hearers, will of themselves do 
the v^ork of adjusting their lives to the 
divine. 

Here is the splendid opportunity of 
the Christian teacher. The mind of youth 
picks up ideas everywhere — strange, fan- 
tastic ones, sometimes ; the boy collects his 
notions about religion from parents, preach- 
ers, friends, reading, church services, a score 
of sources ; but it is passing strange if the 
teacher to whom he brings his mind every 
week like an empty vessel to be filled does 
not furnish some of the greatest and most 
influential of them. The work of teaching 
is infinitely varied, its forms manifold. It is 
shared by every one who succeeds in clutch- 
ing an important idea into another's mind, 
so that it becomes an operative part of 
his mental machinery. But whether done 
in the pulpit or the class-room or the 
home or the street, it is a work of un- 
paralleled efficiency in adjusting youth to 



PEESONAL ADJUSTMENT 145 

life. Let the truths of the gospel be ac- 
tually taught, held in the focus of atten- 
tion until they become an inalienable por- 
tion of the mental store, and their effect will 
duly appear in conduct and character. The 
Spirit waits upon truth so received, and God 
is pleased to impart the divine life to men 
by its means. And the conclusion of the 
argument is established beyond a doubt 
when we take the testimony of the Christian 
centuries; for excepting only a few short 
periods, they all agree that the teacher is 
the prince among evangelists. 



CHAPTEE YII 
A Graded Gospel 

The evangelism that obeys Him who gave 
separate commands to feed the lambs and 
tend the sheep will provide a graded gospel. 
Only a gospel that is graded by the needs 
of the hearers can save those of different 
grades ; only a gospel that grows with the 
growing soul can make Christian children 
into Christian men and women. 

There is a type of evangelism that is too 
busy asserting its confidence in the power of 
the one old gospel to save all human souls to 
pay much heed to this requirement. Never- 
theless, this long overlooked command of the 
Master is being forced into prominence. 
The demand for graded work in religious 
education has become too insistent to be 
longer ignored. The principle is winning 
recognition that the Church is bound to 
adapt its message to hearers of every stage 
of development as well as to those of every 
146 



A GEADED GOSPEL 147 

race and kindred. A host of earnest men 
and women are laboring to put the religious 
training of the young upon a sound psycho- 
logical and pedagogical basis, and to evolve 
a system that shall advance from grade to 
grade in accordance with established educa- 
tional principles ; already much has been ac- 
complished, and the movement has gathered 
a momentum that will carry it to its goal. 

Yet it may be modestly doubted whether, 
in general, the problem has been fairly 
grasped. Inadequate conceptions of the 
nature and aims of a true system of educa- 
tional evangelism are responsible for much 
waste of energy and much inefficient work. 
Because of them many are doing the un- 
necessary and attempting the impossible. 
In particular, the analogy of the graded 
public school has been too strong for some, 
and the confusion of religious with intel- 
lectual education has led many astray. It 
may be well to keep up with the public 
schools, but it is not needful to ape their 
futile experiments, or be in haste to adopt 
methods which they are about to abandon. 
By all means, let the work of religious edu- 



148 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

cation be pursued by the most approved 
modern methods and take advantage of the 
experience of the day-schools ; but let it not 
be imagined that graded Bible-schools and 
lesson helps, graded teaching of the con- 
tents of Scripture and the substance of 
Christian doctrine, insure the proper grading 
of the gospel. The fact must be admitted, 
for fact it is, stubborn and immovable as a 
rock, that the attempt to equal in the Sun- 
day-school the thoroughness and efficiency 
in instruction of the public school is not 
likely to meet with general success until all 
the teaching is done by paid professional 
teachers and all the scholars are compelled 
to attend. And we can watch that expecta- 
tion fade and vanish in the mists of im- 
measurable distance without regret, because 
such instruction, at the best, could make 
only good Biblical scholars, not Christians. 
If the work of the Bible-school and kin- 
dred organizations is to promote in any 
effective manner that personal adjustment 
of the pupil to the divine order which is 
the chief, if not the only, object of religious 
education, the right principle must be found 



A GEADED GOSPEL 149 

to govern the grading of the lessons and 
the construction of the system ; and once 
found, it must be faithfully followed. At 
this point the present writer would imitate 
a well-known philosopher, and, foregoing all 
attempts to construct a perfect system or 
an ideal curriculum himself, would offer cer- 
tain prolegomena to all future systems and 
curricula. 

' The grading of Biblical and doctrinal in- 
struction is an important matter, but it is 
not the grading of the gospel. The intel- 
lectual elements of religion should be pre- 
sented in appropriate connection and se- 
quence to growing minds, but the emphatic 
demand of the present is for a properly 
graded presentation of the whole of religion 
to growing souls. The gospel itself, the 
good news embodied in Jesus Christ, has its 
appropriate grades for such presentation. 
It is these grades that educational evangel- 
ism must discover and put to use. Chris- 
tian teachers must learn the difference be- 
tween a course of graded Bible lessons and 
a graded gospel. 

Educators have made a thorough study of 



150 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

all the stages of the soul's development 
from infancy to age. At every stage the 
characteristic reactions of the soul, intel- 
lectual, emotional and volitional, have been 
noted. The pedagogical maxims that follow 
from the order of the soul's development 
have been carefully formulated, and the 
system of education framed in accordance 
wath them. 

At every stage of development, the soul 
has also its characteristic religious reactions. 
They are not the operations of a special 
faculty, but the reaction of the entire spir- 
itual nature upon a certain kind of material. 
They therefore involve all the character- 
istics of the soul ; they are conditioned by 
and akin to its intellectual, emotional and 
volitional characteristics. There is, as a 
consequence, a characteristic religion of 
childhood, of adolescence, of youth, of man- 
hood and of age. There is also, we insist, 
a gospel, a characteristic Christian gospel, 
for each of these periods ; a gospel designed 
by its divine Author to elicit wholesome 
and saving reactions in the growing soul at 
every stage. 



A GEADED GOSPEL 151 

It is true that there is only one gospel for 
Jew and Greek and barbarian, for child and 
youth and man. Yet the gospel for man- 
hood does differ from the gospel for infancy. 
The difference is not in its content, its sub- 
ject-matter; that is everywhere the same. 
The gospel is Jesus Christ, the Divine 
Person ; that is the only gospel, and noth- 
ing else ever is gospel. The difference is in 
the appeal which this Divine Person makes 
to the soul. The gradation of the gospel is 
the gradation of its appeals. The divine 
personality, in order to impress itself upon 
a human soul, addresses itself now to one, 
now to another characteristic activity of the 
soul, as one or the other is dominant. 

A Christian man's religion, from the point 
of view of psychology, is just the way his 
soul works upon the material of Chris- 
tianity ; that material is the divine life in 
the human, as presented in Jesus Christ. 
Eeligious education, if Christian, must 
therefore be the training of the soul to 
react correctly and effectively upon this 
material. And the one canon to guide the 
educator is that this material — the correct 



152 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

material, the divine life in the world, God 
in man — must be presented to the soul at 
every stage of its development, in accord- 
ance with its present capacity for correct 
reactions, and as a stimulus to such reac- 
tions. The instruction that presents Christ 
in such a way is at once educative and 
evangelistic. 

What is meant by a graded gospel, then, 
is this : — that the personality of Jesus, as the 
union of man with God, is so presented in 
the New Testament, and is to be so pre- 
sented in Christian teaching, as to make a 
fitting and effective appeal even to the soul 
of the infant, eliciting a response marked 
by the psychological characteristics of in- 
fancy indeed, but also characteristically 
Christian, an infant's Christianity ; that 
this divine personality, properly presented, 
makes a like fitting and effective appeal to 
childhood, evoking a reaction of the soul 
that is characteristically childish and Chris- 
tian ; that likewise from the souls of youths 
and men it calls forth a response that in 
every case combines the characteristics of 
youth or manhood with those of Christianity. 



A GEADED GOSPEL 153 

The one business of religious education is to 
present Jesus Christ, and that for which he 
stands, life divine, human life divinized, in 
such a way as to call forth the fitting 
response of the soul at every stage of its 
growth. 

As necessary prolegomena to any effective 
system of education in the Christian religion, 
we would therefore lay down the follow- 
ing propositions : that the essential subject- 
matter of religion is the union of man with 
God, that this subject-matter is embodied in 
the person of Jesus Christ, that his divine 
personality makes a distinctive appeal, Avhich 
is religiously educative, to human souls of 
every degree of intelligence and at every 
stage of development, and that therefore 
the essential thing in any scheme of relig- 
ious education is the proper presentation of 
the divine person, Christ Jesus. It is evident 
that the very conception of religious educa- 
tion requires us to keep the evangelistic pur- 
pose to the fore ; how could it be otherwise ? 
For if education is the drawing out of the 
soul, can religious education be anything 
else than the drawing out of the soul to- 



154 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

ward God ? That is evangelism, too. There 
is a great deal of religious teaching that fails 
to be educational just because it does not 
draw out the soul toward God, but leaves 
it as far from him as before. 

What is the true order in the presenta- 
tion of the Divine Person to growing 
minds ? 

St. Paul was wise enough to feed new 
disciples with milk and not with meat. It 
should need no argument to show that the 
personality of Jesus cannot possibly mean 
the same thing to infants and grown men, and 
that children should not be schooled in the 
religion of maturity. Common sense should 
tell us, but it does not always, and proof has 
been gathered by careful observers, that 
children cannot possibly appreciate the 
higher altruistic teaching of Christ or the 
deepest religious experiences of men. To 
train children to use the language and 
imitate the experiences of adult religion 
is to make them little hypocrites first and 
great skeptics afterward. 

But because the children cannot ap- 
preciate the highest reaches of the gospel, 



A GEADED GOSPEL 155 

it does not follow that the personality of 
Jesus lacks all attractive force for them, 
and that a scientific religious pedagogy re- 
quires all teaching concerning him to be de- 
ferred to later years. It is not less of the 
life and personality of Jesus that the little 
ones need ; it is less of our mature thoughts 
and theories about him. 

The infant mind lies very close to God ; 
the divine — not the philosophical Absolute 
or the theological Infinite — but the divine in 
the human, the God in Christ, is a natural 
object of interest to it. The child looks 
wonderingly but believingly upon the 
marvelous workings of God in the world. 
He loves stories, the more wonderful the 
better, and stories are his proper spiritual 
food. But the very foremost consideration in 
the religious teaching of little children is this : 
that no story, howsoever fascinating, has any 
value whatever for purposes of religious 
education unless it exhibits or illustrates in 
some way the workings of the divine in the 
human, God in the world and in man. That 
God is working in this wondrous world 
about us, that human life is all shot through 



156 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

with glory by the unseen powers of divinity, 
that heaven lies about us in this world — 
that is a truth profoundly educative for in- 
fancy and early childhood. It is the truth 
which the Old Testament stories teach. It 
can be impressed by many stories from out- 
side the Bible if caution be observed to make 
the line of distinction very plain between the 
stories that simply illustrate what might 
take place and those which teach that the 
true God did actually work as represented. 
Parables have their place, and fables, too. 
But teachers are never to teach as true 
what they regard as imaginative ; if religion 
is not to be honeycombed with insincerity 
the tales of pagan superstition must not be 
put upon an equal footing in the child's 
mind Avith the records of Scripture ; stories 
of the gods which Plato would not have in 
his Kepublic two thousand years ago may 
well be spared from Christian homes and 
Sunday-schools now. And by the same 
token, the teacher must distinguish among 
the stories in the Bible itself those that are 
to be taken literally and those that portray 
truths but do not represent facts. 



A GBADED GOSPEL 157 

The superlative stories for infancy and 
early childhood, which represent the work- 
ings of God in the world and in man most 
truthfully and most adequately, are the 
stories of Jesus. To tell them to little chil- 
dren, without explanation, theory or com- 
ment, is to make the most effective possible 
presentation of the great subject-matter of 
religion. They, better than anything else, 
make God real to the infant soul. Even 
those to whom the God of Abraham and 
Isaac and Jacob seems to be only a mon- 
strous man, a magnified Power, understand 
that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ is a loving person. Some things con- 
cerning our Lord's life and passion the little 
ones cannot understand ; but if the object 
of religious education is Christian character, 
the child's mind cannot be too early sup- 
plied with the distinctive Christian material 
of religion, the old, old story of Jesus and 
his love. 

After the first acquisitive, trustful years 
of early childhood, there comes a period of 
doubt. The mind begins to demand reasons 



158 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

and estimate probabilities. Things that 
cannot readily be understood are now often 
met with outright skepticism ; and that, too, 
long before adolescent disturbances begin. 
In this period the miraculous element in 
God's dealings with men is likely to raise 
serious questions, and should not be unduly 
urged upon the attention. For another in- 
terest has come forward. The child is get- 
ting the outlines of that which is " everlast- 
ingly so " settled in his mind ; and his 
incipient conviction that there is a law 
which changes not had best not be disturbed 
by apparent miraculous violations of law ; 
for on the proper crystallization of this con- 
viction the moral vigor of his spirit de- 
pends ; he is laying the foundations of 
conscience. 

The nature and importance of this process 
become more clear from the following con- 
sideration. Two kinds of relations make 
up our lives: necessary relations in which we 
stand by virtue of our humanity, and free 
personal relations into which we enter by 
choice. In childhood, attention is directed 
chiefly to the necessary relations. The child 



A GEADED GOSPEL 159 

is here without choice of his own; he is 
busy learning that there is a world about 
him ; he accepts what he finds. He learns 
that with his parents, his brothers and sis- 
ters, his home and general surroundings, he 
stands in relations over which he has no 
power. 

Note now that it is in this region of 
necessary relationships that law and con- 
science are grounded. It is because certain 
things are necessarily so, that we are bound 
to make certain other things thus and so. 
It is because we stand in necessary relations 
with our parents that we ought to honor 
them. It is because we have necessary, un- 
changeable relations to universal principles 
of righteousness, that it is our duty to shun 
wrong and do right in each specific case. 
The period of childhood, therefore, when 
one is discovering these necessary relations 
and making himself familiar with the fixed 
points in the environment of his life, is the 
proper time for the unchanging certainties 
of the moral environment also to be learned, 
and the conscience to be formed. As a 
matter of fact, conscience is formed and 



160 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

fixed for life in most persons before they are 
twelve years old ; only a great revolution 
can change it after that. 

How shall educational evangelism deal 
with the conscience-forming period of child- 
hood ? 

It is evident that before one can become a 
Christian, his moral nature must be set 
right. No one can be a Christian whose 
moral perceptions and convictions are all 
awry. St. Paul discovered that the law had 
been a schoolmaster to bring men to Christ. 
The divine in Christ can by no means be 
appreciated or held as an ideal, the meaning 
of salvation through Christ by no means 
understood, until the everlasting principles 
of right and w^rong are estimated at their 
true valuation. Does not this require us to 
give the children a thorough course in the 
Old Testament before introducing them to 
the New, and show that the historical ap- 
proach is the only true approach to Christ ? 

Such a plan has been suggested, and ably 
defended. But it is as far from the Chris- 
tian method as Sinai is from Calvary. For 
the law on which a child's conscience is to 



A GEADED GOSPEL 161 

be formed is not found in the Old Testa- 
ment. We do not undervalue the Old Tes- 
tament by insisting that it must be kept in 
its place ; and that place is the region of 
foreshado wings in ethics as in religion. The 
conscience of Christian children is to be 
shaped not by Mosaic but by Christian 
ethics. Many of the moral precepts of the 
ancient law are adopted by the gospel with- 
out change of wording, and should be 
memorized by children as foundation mate- 
rials for moral education. But the ethical 
principle of the Mosaic system cannot com- 
pare with the ethical principle of Christ in 
power to grip and hold and rectify the 
moral nature. The law of Moses rests on 
the divine command — " God spake all these 
words." The ethical principle of Jesus is 
the divine Fatherhood — every command and 
exhortation is referred to the wish or char- 
acter of " your Father who is in heaven," 
and the reason urged for obedience is " that 
ye may be sons of your Father who is 
in heaven." The Christian conceptions 
of right, duty and law are based upon 
the fatherly relation of God to men. The 



162 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

law which is now to lead our children to 
Christ is the law that he came not to destroy 
but to fulfil, namely, not the law given in 
commandments and ordinances, but the 
eternal law of the fatherly and filial relation 
of God and man. 

In developing the conscience of the child 
by this law, there is a wide range of mate- 
rial to be used in moral instruction. The 
most effective is that which presents con- 
crete cases of good and evil deeds, the strug- 
gle of righteousness with sin, divine sonship 
with human selfishness ; stories which bear 
their meaning home to the soul without any 
hcBc fabula docet^ and elicit the fitting re- 
sponse of approval or disapproval from the 
child's moral nature. By such exercise the 
moral judgment is trained to act keenly, 
promptly and decisively. And here again 
one set of stories is preeminent. The stories 
of the Ideal Man, the perfect Son, are peer- 
less for the culture of the moral nature. 
Among them there is one that transcends 
all the rest. A hundred generations have 
found that there is nothing else in all the 
world that touches the conscience with so 



A GEADED GOSPEL 163 

sure, so safe, so masterl}^ a touch as the story 
of the Cross. The story of the cross of 
Christ is the supreme power on earth for the 
rectification of conscience. This, more than 
all else, corrects errors in the moral view, 
brings men into sympathy with the mind of 
God, and makes them see the true nature of 
moral offenses and the unspeakable worth 
of holiness. In the presence of the cross of 
Christ there is no room for casuistry or con- 
fusion. The child cannot understand the 
atonement, and should not be asked to try. 
But children can, and do, very early, catch 
the meaning of the fact that Christ died for 
the sin of the world ; children can, and do, 
very early, bring their moral natures to the 
cross of Christ, and there begin to gain the 
Christian insight into the great realities of 
right and wrong, suffering and sacrifice, sin 
and salvation. 

Childhood learns the world, and conforms 
to it. With adolescence comes the conscious- 
ness of a new self within the soul. The 
necessary relations of life, having become 
fairly familiar, retreat to form the back- 



164 EDUOATIOKAL EVANGELISM 

ground of consciousness henceforth, while a 
new interest comes to the fore. The child 
has been wonderingly learning to know the 
world without ; the youth is now amazed at 
the world he finds within. The mysteries 
of his own personality now challenge him 
to search them out. He finds himself occu- 
pied with the problems of a free person. 
He ceases to ask, concerning things, what 
is ; begins to think what may be, what he 
can cause to be. Toward persons he begins 
to act as a person, no longer imitatively, but 
freely, independently. Personal interests 
now become the supreme concern of his life. 
In early adolescence, this main concern is 
largely self-centered. The youth is learning 
to know himself ; his spirit is distinctly anti- 
social. But with self-knowledge comes a 
new interest in what life and truth shall 
mean to him, and he passes into the second 
period of adolescence. He now shows that 
he is no longer a child by declining to ap- 
propriate without reserve everything ofi'ered 
to his mind ; he begins to sift and sort 
and separate ; discriminates, questions, grows 
more positive of his beliefs and disbeliefs. 



A GEADED GOSPEL 165 

His mind takes up the higher rational proc- 
esses, and insists on having reasons, evi- 
dence, proof. He declines to believe on the 
authority of others, unless he has full confi- 
dence in their veracity ; declines to act on 
the direction of others, unless he is fully 
assured of their wisdom. 

In the later period of adolescence, the 
youth discovers that he is a member of 
society. His intellectual unrest is accom- 
panied by feelings, emotions, aspirations 
hitherto unknown, that carry him out of 
himself. Conscience, now well-defined in 
character, broadens its reach, and the moral 
imperative bears down upon the soul of 
youth with a weight never felt when the 
child obeyed superiors without question and 
without responsibility. As a child, this 
youth was cared for ; now he must begin to 
care for others. Boys and girls leave school 
to become breadwinners. " Not to be min- 
istered unto, but to minister," takes on for 
them the dead-earnest meaning of real life. 
The self-centered life of the child is being 
transformed into the socialized life of the 
man, and the claims of the social order are 



166 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

one by one enforced upon him. The strong- 
est of all the forces that work to this end 
comes into play when the differentiation of 
the sexes is complete and each begins to feel 
the attractions and realize its own need of 
the other. At last the process by which 
youths and maidens are naturalized in the 
social world — that is, the world of persons — 
reaches its culmination, when, after the 
years of storm and stress, of distrust and 
bashfulness, perhaps of flightiness and fri- 
volity, they settle down as heads of families, 
accepting in marriage the full social obliga- 
tions of maturity. 

Thus nature has ordained that the normal 
business of youth shall be to find one's true 
place in the world of free persons. Just as 
physical development is the main interest at 
one period, so personal and social relations 
become the supreme concern at another. 
What is the vanity of youth, but just an ex- 
pression of the new consciousness of 

** This main liiiracle, that thou art thou, 
With power on thine own act, and on the world " ? 

What is youth's sentimentalism, but a sense 



A GEADED GOSPEL 167 

of the value of personality with its purposes 
and passions, exaggerated because it has 
just come into the field of vision and fills it 
completely ? 

The long and passionate struggle of a 
youth's restless years is to get a correct ad- 
justment of personal and social relations 
with the persons who make up the human 
world about him, and the Supreme Person 
above. On correct adjustment here, the 
blessedness or the perdition of life depends ; 
the burden of responsibility cannot be 
shifted ; each must make his own adjust- 
ment, with fatal results for weal or woe ; 
and that is why the hopes of youth are such 
bounding hopes, the sorrows of youth such 
poignant sorrows. 

Youth, then, is the normal time when one 
should " experience religion." Morality is 
an interpretation of the necessary relations 
of the soul ; the moral idea is that of happy 
conformity to that which is essentially so. 
But religion is characteristically personal, is 
an interpretation of personal relations ; the 
religious idea, as distinguished from the 
moral, is that of harmony between free per- 



168 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

sons, right personal relations between man 
and God. Since relations of this kind form 
the foreground of the thought of youth, the 
soul is clearly ready for the distinctively re- 
ligious appeal. 

The Christ for youth is the Christ who 
enters into free relations with men ; who 
walked and ate and talked with men, re- 
ceived their homage and relieved their pain, 
instructed their minds and forgave their 
sins ; who was loved by John, denied by 
Peter, betrayed by Judas, condemned by 
Pilate, and worshiped by Mary ; who bids 
men enter into life by the narrow gate, deny 
self, take up the cross, leave all and follow 
him. The aggravated self-consciousness of 
youth implies a potential corresponding con- 
sciousness of the worth of other selves ; the 
youth knows how to do and suffer for an- 
other. He is ready for the altruistic teach- 
ing of the gospel ; losing life that it may be 
saved now comes to have a real, clear mean- 
ing for him. In all the world of persons to 
whom life may be devoted, Christ appears 
as supreme, the One above all others to be 
believed in, trusted, loved and served ; the 



A GEADED GOSPEL 169 

one entirely worthy Master of the soul, to 
die for whom is gain. 

Of the presentation of Christ to the souls 
that are mature, it need only be said here, 
that these souls have reached the time for 
life's work, and the Christ that appeals to 
them is Christ the Worker. The religion of 
service is the religion for manhood. Con- 
science has been developed, personal relations 
largely settled, personal habits made stable, 
life's calling found, one's home fixed ; now 
there is work to do ! The soul of the man 
who does his honest share of the work of the 
world needs often to see Jesus working his 
divine work, offering to God his faithful 
service, blessing the world by his toil and 
pain and sacrifice. The heroic in Christ 
calls forth the manly in men, and is educa- 
tive until life's work is done. 

Since the Church, willingly or not, is defi- 
nitely committed to the methods of educa- 
tional evangelism as the chief means of 
winning men to God, its greatest need is 
skill, guided by the Holy Spirit, in handling 



170 EDUCATIOIsrAL EVANGELISM 

a graded gospel. Those who are skilled to 
present Christ adequately and appropriately 
to human souls of every grade — or of one 
particular grade — are in demand. Great 
progress has been made in recent years, but 
yet how many Sunday-school teachers are 
there who really understand the character- 
istic differences between infancy, childhood 
and youth, and know how to change the 
appeal of their teaching at just the right 
stage of growth ? How many, for example, 
know how to teach the Ten Commandments 
to children as an expression of the highest 
right, the will of a Father to be implicitly 
obeyed ; and then how to set those same 
words before youths as an expression of the 
Highest Person's mind, the terms of right 
relations and happy fellowship with him ? 
It is because of failure to understand the 
grading of the gospel that the appeal to the 
higher personal consciousness is so often of- 
fered to little children who cannot possibly 
— for physiological as well as psychological 
reasons — comprehend it; and it thus becomes 
wretched cant and driveling sentiment on 
the lips of the teacher ; and on those of the 



A GEADED GOSPEL 171 

children, if they take it up, soul-deadening 
hypocrisy. How often boys at the period 
of adolescence grow weary of the Sunday- 
school because their teacher does not know 
any better than to continue with them the 
moral appeal of childhood ! It was the best 
thing possible for them two years ago, but 
is now become a barren platitude, mere 
goody-goodiness, because their souls are 
ready for a deeper, personal religion. 

In that reorganization of the evangelistic 
methods of the church which is so urgently de- 
manded, the very first step is to learn the dis- 
tinctive appeals of the Divine Person which 
are effective at the different stages of the 
soul's development. When they have been 
mastered, graded instruction in the contents 
of the Bible and the doctrines of the faith 
may well receive attention. But no religious 
instruction will possess permanent attraction 
and interest for human souls if it fails to hold 
before them all the time the fundamental 
religious truth, the divine in the human. 
Stories may interest little children for a few 
years — any kind of stories ; picnics may 
keep the boys in school a little longer — any 



172 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

kind of picnics. But the men of our day- 
are in more serious business than being en- 
tertained with stories and picnics ; and 
they will surely not be found in the church 
or Sunday-school that fails to supply the 
hunger of their souls for the divine fellow- 
ship by making the one supreme religious 
idea of the union of the earthly with the 
celestial — the divine life in man, God in the 
world, the Son of God incarnate — central in 
all its teaching. 



CHAPTEE YIII 
The School of Worship 

If there is one thing that the churches of 
America are trying with all their human 
might to do, it is to enroll all their children 
and young people in Sunday-schools, Young 
People's Societies, or kindred organizations, 
and keep them there until they are ready to 
unite with the church. 

They cannot do it. They never will be 
able to do it. And there is a good reason 
why. 

The reason is not the inefficiency of the 
Sunday-schools. We are not about to 
launch out in a criticism of them. The}^ 
are not perfect, but they are the greatest 
adjunct of the church in this age. The 
faith that men show in the Sunday-school 
as the leading institution in the American 
system of religious education, and their 
determination to improve it, are among the 
173* 



174 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

most encouraging features of the present 
situation. We are not here concerned, how- 
ever, to discuss the Sunday-school or any 
other form of organized religious work, but 
only to comment on the behavior of youth 
toward the institutions of religion, and to 
inquire what that behavior means. 

Let us put together two of the best 
known facts in this field. The first is the 
disposition of the larger boys — and girls, 
too, in a slightly less degree — to leave the 
Sunday-school during adolescence. The 
Sunday-school gets and interests the chil- 
dren. In most communities, there is little 
occasion to raise the question how to get 
the children into the Sunday-school. They 
are already there — some of them in two or 
three schools. We hear of multitudes who 
do not attend church ; but their children do 
attend our Sunday-schools. But beyond the 
age of childhood we cannot keep them. 
About the age of twelve they begin to get 
restless, and in a few months or years the 
most of them are gone. Nor have we de- 
vised any effectual means of inducing them 
to stay. There are exceptional teachers, 



THE SCHOOL OF WOESHIP 175 

who by exceptional means hold exceptional 
classes together. There are other classes 
that simply cannot be held. We have our 
Junior Societies and Leagues; it is easy 
enough to attract large numbers of children 
to them ; but they are conspicuously unsuc- 
cessful in graduating boys of fourteen to 
sixteen years into the senior societies. We 
organize Boys' Brigades, Sunday-school 
baseball teams, and so on; and the very 
boys for whom we plan them ridicule the 
whole thing. It is probable that, in general, 
the great majority of the children under 
fourteen are in some Sunday-school or 
children's religious society, while a clear 
majority of youths of both sexes from four- 
teen to twenty-one are not in any Sunday- 
school or religious society. A certain pro- 
portion remain ; but with regard to the 
majority, it is not difficult, it is impossible, 
to keep them in Sunday-school, Young 
People's Society, or any kindred organiza- 
tion. 

There is one fact; now consider the 
other. It has long been customary in 
revival meetings to w^arn people against 



176 EDIJCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

delay by an exhibition of the comparative 
numbers who begin the religious life at 
different ages. The evangelist asks those 
converted before they were twenty to rise 
and three-fourths of the congregation rise ; 
he asks those converted after forty to rise, 
and there are only a handful. The argu- 
ment is unanswerable. In more recent 
years, the age of conversion has been made 
a matter of scientific study, and all are now 
familiar with the statistics collected by 
President G. Stanley Hall and his follovvers, 
showing that nearly all of those who ever 
become members of the church are con- 
verted and join the church between the 
ages of twelve and twenty. This is the 
second fact. Put the two together; the 
result is amazingly worth our attention ; 
the age at which the Sunday-school loses 
most is the age at which the church gains 
most. The time of exodus from the Sun- 
day-school is the time of ingathering for 
the church. The period of alienation and 
estrangement, when the big boys and girls 
forsake the Sunday-school and similar or- 
ganizations is the very time when they 



THE SCHOOL OF WOESHIP 177 

flock to join the church. What is the mean- 
ing of this ? 

Some would dismiss the matter by saying 
that it simply means the separation of the 
religiously inclined from those who are not 
so. Those who care nothing for religion 
leave the Sunday-school and other religious 
services, while those who remain in the 
Sunday-school and Endeavor Society be- 
come members of the church. There is 
much truth in this view ; but not enough 
truth to explain our facts. For what pro- 
portion of the members of the church are in 
the Sunday-school? Suppose we say one- 
third, which is surely a generous estimate. 
The fact then remains that two-thirds of 
the confessedly religious people, those who 
become members of the church, do not 
keep up their connection with the Sunday- 
school. 

The true explanation lies deeper. In our 
study of that dramatic action through 
which a soul passes on its way from child- 
hood to maturity we have found a con- 
stitutional reason for these facts. 

We have seen that youth is the time when 



178 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

the soul finds itself, and that the essential 
features of the process of self -disco very are 
alienation and return. The youth realizes 
the meaning of his individual personality by 
setting himself over against his environ- 
ment; questioning, experimenting, investi- 
gating, in order that his convictions may 
rest upon his own experience and his life 
become self -governed. With some tempera- 
ments, as w^e have seen, this process involves 
a radical and sweeping change, a sometimes 
violent throwing off of home restraints and 
influences, a strange turning against things 
loved in childhood, an unsettling of the 
whole moral and spiritual life. With any 
temperament, there is a tendency for the 
boy to become self-conscious, bashful, secre- 
tive ; he dreads to be questioned or pressed 
closely ; will not speak, if he can help it, of 
his most intimate thoughts ; refuses to ex- 
hibit his heart to any one. 

He ceases to go to Sunday-school because 
his nature shrinks from the close personal 
touch with the truth and the teacher in the 
presence of others which a small Sunday- 
school class involves. He will avoid his 



THE SCHOOL OF WOESHIP 179 

pastor, father, mother, or any one else 
likely to speak to him of religious things, 
because his whole soul resents interference 
with its God-given privilege of discovering 
life for itself. The only one who can win 
his confidence, is the one who understands 
him without saying so, and forbears to in- 
trude upon his private thoughts. He de- 
clines to take part in a prayer-meeting, be- 
cause he is not ready to speak of his own 
new spiritual experiences ; he really does 
not know what to say, for he is so unsettled. 
And those who say that he ought not to be so 
unsettled, simply do not understand youth, 
and are impertinent meddlers with God's 
and Nature's ways. 

But none the less, " the thoughts of youth 
are long, long thoughts." The adolescent 
mind is keenly sensitive to spiritual truth. 
No one is more deeply, passionately inter- 
ested in the good, the right, the true and 
the beautiful. The boy's mind is warm and 
fertile soil, all ready for the good seed and 
thirsting for the water of life to make it 
grow. Life and what to do with it, love 
and its meaning, self-sacrifice and the spleu- 



180 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

dor of it, are the familiar thoughts of the 
adolescent boy. He demands reality and 
not make-believe, substance and not show, 
the perfect and not the defective, the whole 
and not a part. That is why you cannot 
save him with a fragment of the gospel 
or satisfy him with a fraction of the church 
life. That is why this boy who has grown 
tired of the Sunday-school despises the pas- 
tor or parent who hopes to make him re- 
ligious with a Boys' Brigade or a ball-team. 
That is why all methods that appeal to any- 
thing except the highest in him are doomed 
to fail. Unwilling to express himself about 
religious matters he undeniably is ; irre- 
ligious he emphatically is not. 

What he needs is a place where, all un- 
questioned and unobserved, he may lift up 
his heart to God and give wings to his as- 
pirations ; where, without being hastened 
or pressed, yet with wise help and guidance, 
he may think out his long thoughts until 
they settle his character for life. We are 
often in too much haste to secure a confes- 
sion, and the allegiance of the youth to an 
institution of religion ; God's way is to build 



THE SCHOOL OF WOESHIP 181 

character, and to trust a character built on 
Christ to make its own confession before the 
world. 

That place which the boy needs, God has 
provided for him. It is the service of wor- 
ship where the Word is preached. When 
all other expedients have done their utmost, 
they but make it increasingly clear that the 
supreme institution for religious education 
is that School of Worship, which in some 
form or other has existed ever since the first 
rude altar of stones was built, and in which 
God, not man, presides over the religious 
education of his children. 

Observe how the service of this place suits 
the soul of youth as though designed ex- 
pressly to meet its needs. 

The spiritual unrest and turmoil, the 
undefined feelings and vague longings for 
a life larger and more beautiful than yet 
realized, the aspirations of the soul, its 
hopes and fears and passions, all so keen, 
so fresh, so wondrous, so little understood 
by the new-born adolescent, prepare him 
to see in the service of worship, wath its 
ritual and symbol and sacrament, a world 



182 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

of rich meaning and deep satisfaction for 
his uneasy spirit. Let the emotions that 
make youth restless and fickle and senti- 
mental be understood, and it will be clear 
that there is nothing in the wide world so 
fitted to satisfy and regulate them as a 
church service of worship. Again, the new 
independence in thinking, the impulse of the 
adolescent mind to work vigorously along 
the higher reaches of rational exercise, just 
fit him to follow and appreciate the contin- 
uous discourse of sermons. Now, if ever, 
the mind develops the powder to think con- 
nectedly, and learns to take delight in dis- 
cursive thought. And again, the adolescent 
impulse to social life, the passion to be like 
and with mature persons, which takes offense 
at the suggestion that a youth's place is with 
the children or in some corner by himself, is 
satisfied when the boy takes his place among 
grown-up worshipers in the house of God ; 
while the youthful shyness that seeks con- 
cealment feels no violence done to it w^hen 
the youthful worshiper worships unnoticed 
by men as one of a congregation. Thus the 
service of the church answers the needs and 



THE SCHOOL OF WOESHIP 183 

processes of the adolescent soul as deep call- 
eth unto deep ; and in these youthful years, 
or never, will he form the habit of regular 
and appreciative attendance on worship and 
sermons. If, as a child, he has been present 
at these services, he has neither appreciated 
the liturgy nor understood the sermons ; in 
a few years, as a man, he will have no use 
for either if they fail in these sensitive ado- 
lescent years to find and hold him. 

What, then, is a truly educational evangel- 
ism to do for the youth ? Does not the 
finger of God, revealed in the nature that 
he has implanted in the soul of youth, give 
direction that when this time of alienation 
comes, our effort should be to make these 
young people at home in the services of the 
church, rather than to keep them in the 
children's place or put them off in an or- 
ganization by themselves ? Is not our fail- 
ure with them largely due to our misunder- 
standing of the real needs of their spiritual 
natures? With certain temperaments, in- 
cluding a large proportion of the boys, the 
ordinary methods of Sunday-school and 
Young People's Society and like associa- 



184 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

tions are utterly opposed to the processes of 
adolescent growth. To hold such youths in 
the Sunday-school may be to do violence 
to their spiritual natures, — to work, not 
with, but against, God in their souls. And 
let it be remembered that every method or 
agency used in religious work must give 
account to God not only for the souls whom 
it wins and saves, but also for all whom it 
alienates and destroys. That some methods 
widely used do needlessly and cruelly drive 
men from the church and harden them 
against religion, is a fact beyond the possi- 
bility of doubt. 

Be it distinctly understood that these 
w^ords are not written in criticism of Sun- 
day-schools, Young People's Societies, boys' 
clubs, and like agencies, but in rebuke of 
the stupidity that imagines that these agen- 
cies will accomplish the all-important things. 
Nearly all the young people who join the 
church come from the Sunday-school or 
Young People's Society ; that is an unques- 
tioned fact, and is as it should be; let it 
stand. But it is passing strange how any, 
even the well-known wayfaring man, can 



THE BCHOOL Oi' WORSHIP 185 

miss the other fact, that all these agencies 
hav^e few, if any, converts to report where 
adolescent boys and girls do not attend 
services of worship and preaching. Give 
all due credit to every agency that helps, 
but let not the helper claim to be the master 
workman. The services of worship repre- 
sent the most efficient institution for the 
development of the religious nature, the 
education of human souls for God, that the 
Creator has been able to bring forth upon 
this earth after dealing with hundreds of 
generations ; and what a comment it is on 
human folly, that when men set themselves 
to devise a system of religious education 
they practically ignore this institution in all 
their discussions I 

That church, we hold, is making a fatal 
blunder which places its chief dependence 
for the winning of the youth on any special 
means outside its own services. Supplement 
those services as you will ; but once give a 
boy to understand that he is such a peculiar 
creature that a special place apart from the 
men and women has to be provided for him ; 
give him the impression that you have no 



186 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

hope of making a Christian man of him by 
the regular God-appointed means, and you 
have done him the last irreparable injury 
for which no effort or sacrifice on your part 
can atone. And is not this precisely the 
impression made by some of our present 
methods? We hustle hither and thither, 
and busy ourselves with everything else ex- 
cept showing the boys their place in the 
church itself. We send them to Bible 
classes, urge them to join this club or that 
association, go about all sorts of circui- 
tous ways to catch by guile those who, 
above all things, love directness and are 
glad to be won by sincerity. But, in most 
churches, who thinks of interpreting the 
service of worship to the youth, showing 
them how to enter into it, how to make 
public praise and common praj-er the wings 
of their own spirits to lift them up to God, 
how to find in anthem and hymn and psalm 
and Scripture and sermon the bread and the 
water of life ? Who does anything to make 
them feel that the service is for them ? So 
long as we, by conduct and method and 
organization, often, too, by outright asser- 



THE SCHOOL OF WOESHIP 187 

tion, give the boys to understand that we 
expect them to get their religious culture 
and inspiration from some other source, how 
in the name of reason can we expect to find 
the men in the church ? 

Parents and pastors should leave off their 
busy scheming and faithless worrying about 
the boys, and take time to ponder these 
facts in their hearts : — That Jewish law and 
custom required parents to take their twelve- 
year-old boys, not to some place prepared 
for the boys alone, but to the great temple 
at Jerusalem, the center of the religious life 
of the whole people ; that Jesus, going thus 
to the temple at twelve years of age, found, 
to his unspeakable delight, that it was his 
natural and fitting place, so that he won- 
dered that his parents should look for him 
anywhere else ; that we, like the learned 
doctors there, would be amazed at the un- 
derstanding and answers of our twelve-year- 
old boys, did we but take pains to discover 
their real thoughts of religious truth ; and 
that the place of the big boy, with his en- 
larging life and his passionately aspiring 
soul, is not necessarily in the Sunday-school 



188 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

or the boys' club, which may indeed do 
something for him, but is necessarily in his 
Father's house, which will do all for him. 

We can well afford to let everything else 
wait until pastors and people have attended 
to this matter of securing the attendance of 
the young people of from twelve to twenty 
at the services of worship where the gospel 
is preached, and have provided there those 
varied, rich and inspiring elements of wor- 
ship, and that simple, manful, luminous, 
convincing testimony to the truth which 
the adolescent soul demands. For what- 
ever other methods may be employed, our 
hope of sound, intelligent conversions, of 
lives devoted to the Master and characters 
built on him, centers there. 

It might seem to some that the confirma- 
tion system of the historic churches pre- 
cisely meets the situation here developed; 
for it is a great, regular, established, insti- 
tutional effort to bring the adolescent chil- 
dren into the church itself. It has not only 
centuries of Christian practice to commend 
it, but the practice of Jews and pagans as 



THE SCHOOL OF WORSHIP 189 

well. The instinct of humanity has given 
its voice in favor of some recognized method 
of initiating the adolescent youth into the 
sacred rites of his people. Some such es- 
tablished practice is necessary to any com- 
plete system of educational evangelism. 
The churches that practice confirmation are 
not disposed to abandon it; and under 
various names and forms, such as catechet- 
ical classes, pastor's classes, and the like, 
which offer special instruction for those 
about to join the church, its essential 
features are rapidly coming back into the 
churches where it has been supplanted by 
the methods of the revival system. 

Yet confirmation, as commonly practised, 
is by no means an ideal method in religious 
education. The old objection is still valid 
that it tends to formality, emphasizes the 
intellectual rather than the vital, and makes 
too little of the personal decision to live 
the Christian life. But a far more serious 
difficulty is that children are usually con- 
firmed too soon. It is a dangerously easy 
thing to take children in whom the new life 
of adolescence is not fully awake, teach 



190 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

them a catechism, persuade them that they 
ought to become communicants, and receive 
them into the church. What is accom- 
plished by this ? The one thing made per- 
fectly certain is, that the church itself, its 
services and its communion, have been 
placed among the things from which the 
adolescent youth will soon feel himself 
estranged. The fact that they are com- 
municants doubtless helps to hold some few 
steady through the storms of youth; but 
even these few are compelled to raise the 
question of the meaning and value of their 
church-membership, and very large num- 
bers simply withdraw from active participa- 
tion in the church life, because they now 
realize that they became communicants 
without understanding what it meant. 
Thus early confirmation defeats its own ob- 
ject. If the church is to have the personal 
loyalty of its members — and why should 
they be members on any other terms ? — it is 
far more consonant w^ith the laws of the 
soul's development that church-membership 
and communion should, as a rule, be among 
the things on the farther side of youth's 



THE SCHOOL OF WOESHIP 191 

estrangement, and be regarded, like citizen- 
ship, marriage, and business or professional 
life, as elements in the new, higher life that 
opens up to a young man when the disturb- 
ances of early adolescence are past. 

To speak the truth, there is a bane of 
brevity that rests on most of our plans for 
bringing young people into the church. 
They lack the ordered continuity of purpose 
and effort essential to the promotion of vital 
religious advancement. There is no short 
cut from childish to mature faith. Nature 
takes ten years to do her special work in the 
soul of the youth ; can the church expect to 
do hers in ten days or ten weeks ? To re- 
ceive children into the communion of the 
church just at the dawn of that period 
when their anti-social instincts awake, and 
then to think that they are safe, and ignore 
their special needs during the disturbances 
that are sure to follow, is only botching the 
work. And we have seen that it is a sore 
delusion to imagine that the situation can 
be adequately met by the formation of 
Young People's Societies, or any expedient 
of that kind. A true educational method 



192 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

must walk patiently by the side of youth 
through all the steps of its progress, recog- 
nizing its right to be anti-social — against all 
societies — at one time, welcoming the ap- 
pearance of the gang spirit as a sign of a 
new social impulse, confident that the 
higher social instincts will assert their power 
later on, sure that the first thing is to keep 
the youth's place in his Father's house al- 
ways ready for his return, careful above all 
things that he shall not be made to feel that 
he is utterly lost to religion and the church 
because he rebels against conventional forms 
and insists on going his own way for a time. 
If it is true, as is asserted, that an in- 
creasing proportion of young men do not 
attend or support the church, may not one 
reason be the failure of the church to min- 
ister understandingly and fittingly to them 
in youth ? This is indeed a large subject, 
not to be disposed of in a few sentences. 
The following suggestions are not made in 
the spirit of one who would lightly heal the 
hurt of Israel, but as matters that must be 
duly considered if the situation is to be 
fairly met. 



THE SCHOOL OF WOESHIP 193 

1. We must deal with youth in vital, not 
formal, ways. They are to be regarded, not 
as factors in the parish organization, but as 
actors in its life. The very first thing re- 
quired is that the church itself shall take 
cognizance of its youth ; as a worshiping 
body, it must be aware of them, sensitive to 
their presence, responsive to their needs. 
Youth should be in our congregations as in 
our homes ; their place is not the nursery, 
but the family living-room. There is no 
call to order either the church or the home 
life entirely to suit them, for they are only 
a part of the family, but it is a righteous 
demand that they shall not be ignored. 

2. It would be natural to say, in the 
next place, that the church services should 
be adapted to youth ; but this has been 
already done. No violent reconstruction of 
our methods of worship, no radical change 
in the style of preaching, is required by the 
interests of youth ; all that is necessary is 
to be true to the ideals now cherished. The 
nearer we come to the ideal church service, 
the nearer we come to what youth wants. 
Dull sermons, tedious prayers, "balloon- 



194 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

ing " by the choir, are no more profitable 
for age than for youth. But the perennial 
freshness of the gospel imparts a youthful 
spirit to the very nature of Christian wor- 
ship. We all go to church to have renewed 
in us the hopefulness and confidence, the 
courage and assurance, the fresh enthusiasm 
and glad anticipations, that are youth's own 
property. Surely if this atmosphere is in 
the service, youth will feel at home there. 
And when it comes to the teaching, the 
doctrine, the sermon, there is hardly a 
greater homiletic mistake than to suppose 
that the best thought of a mature mind 
presented in the most effective way to reach 
earnest men is not the proper food for the 
youth. Children's sermons may be very well 
for children now and then, but they are an 
abomination to boys in long trousers ; what 
they need is the preacher's best thought, 
put in his most businesslike way. If a 
sermon is prepared for those who are fond 
of some special type of thought or method 
of discourse, it is likely to miss the youth ; 
but not if it is a vital utterance of substan- 
tial truth addressed to serious men and 



THE SCHOOL OF WOESHIP 195 

women. That is all youth asks, for it is what 
youth loves. 

3. Perhaps the greatest need of all at 
present is a concerted and continuous effort 
on the part of pastors, parents, pewholders, 
Sunday-school officers and teachers, and all 
concerned, to secure the attendance of the 
youth at the church services. Many Chris- 
tian people thoughtlessly allow their chil- 
dren to grow up without forming the habit 
of attending church; the Sunday-school or 
children's society is considered enough for 
them, until suddenly it appears that they 
do not want to go to any religious service. 
In many, if not most, Sunday-schools there 
are children whose parents do not attend 
church, so that they are not likely of them- 
selves to form the church-going habit. In 
some places the free-seat crusade has wrought 
havoc with the idea that a whole family 
should sit together in their own pew, and 
the younger members have felt free to sit 
where and come when they pleased. So 
it has come to pass that there exists in 
almost every parish a considerable number 
of boys and girls between twelve and twenty 



196 EDUCATIONAL EVAKGELISM 

years of age who have never learned to at- 
tend the church services or enter into its 
worship, although in a very real sense they 
belong to that parish. The church itself 
must go after these young people ; under 
no circumstances are they to be committed 
to the care of any subordinate organization. 
They are in their golden age, and they form 
the church's golden opportunity. Nothing 
else in its work is so promising. It may be 
a church that occupies a position of com- 
manding influence, and has heavy duties in 
leading the thought and shaping the moral 
sentiment of a large community, but it will 
lose nothing of influence or standing if it 
brings all possible resources to bear upon 
the problem of securing the regular attend- 
ance and the reverent attention of these 
young people at its services. 

The effort will call for patience. Some 
of these young people will assert their inde- 
pendence in perverse and exasperating ways. 
Disappointed hopes are familiar inmates of 
every heart that deals with youth. But 
those who drift out of Sunday-school and 
seldom or never attend church are not to 



THE SCHOOL OF WOESHIP 197 

be given up. They are to be followed with 
a care as faithful and a love as true as 
though they were already communicants of 
the church. If we were less hasty and im- 
patient, less ready to cross their names off 
our lists and our memories when they turn 
their backs upon us, perhaps fewer young 
men would remain in the far country of 
estrangement from the church. 

4. If the church is to command the re- 
spect of youth, church-membership should 
be held before them as an ideal for ma- 
turity. There are exceptional children who 
should be received into the church very 
early, and it is an unwise course to put off 
any who manifest a really intelligent desire 
to become communicants. But the man 
who defers church-membership until the 
follies of 3^outh are past is in a more hope- 
ful spiritual condition than the one who 
went through it all in childhood and con- 
siders it a thing outgrown. The very heart 
is taken out of youth if it have not some- 
thing to look forward to. In religious mat- 
ters, as in others, it is a mistake to deprive 
young people of the privilege of anticipating 



198 EDUCATIONAL EVAl^GELISM 

things which the older people enjoy but 
which are still denied to them. Too often 
the spirit of '' 'T is done, the great transac- 
tion 's done" takes possession of the boys 
and girls that have been received into com- 
munion, and their development is arrested 
because they have been admitted too early 
and too easily to the highest privileges of 
church life. Sixteen to twenty years is in 
general the best age for young people to 
join the church ; and then they are not to 
come in as those who have already attained, 
but as those entering a race, determined to 
press on to a goal clearly seen but not to be 
reached without earnest effort. 

5. Finally, in all dealings with young 
people, it is necessary to bear constantly in 
mind the distinction between personal and 
institutional religion. That is not first 
which is institutional, but that which is 
personal; then that which is institutional. 
Youth's first task is to achieve a personal 
religion. In doing so he is very likely to 
undervalue religious institutions. He will 
probably affect to be able to do without 
them for a time ; he may boast that he can 



THE SCHOOL OF WOESHIP 199 

find and worship God as well by other 
means. It may be that he must learn some 
lessons in* the school of life before he is pre- 
pared to acknowledge his debt to the insti- 
tutions of worship. But if he seriously takes 
those lessons to heart, he will come in time 
to see the value of the church to society and 
to himself. He will learn that human wel- 
fare is essentially a social thing, and no man 
can be saved outside the Christian commu- 
nity. He will find that the very things 
among his own spiritual possessions on which 
he prides himself most are his only by virtue 
of his place in a Christian society, so that he 
must ask himself. What hast thou that thou 
hast not received ? And he will discover 
that, next to the school of life, the school of 
worship is the educational center for God's 
discipline of human souls. There, under the 
tuition of the heavenly influences that are 
exercised by devout prayer and lofty praise 
and reverent meditation, the soul is led most 
surely forth to meet its God ; and he who 
once has learned, in the school of life, to say 
from the heart, " I love thy kingdom, Lord," 
is likely to go on, as the years of sweet and 



200 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

sober experience add their touches to his 
spirit and finish its education, and say, 

** I love thy church, O God. 



** Beyond my highest joy 

I prize her heavenly ways, 
Her sweet communion, solemn vows. 
Her hymns of love and praise. '' 



CHAPTER IX 

Aims and Expectations 

It was to be expected that the study of 
adolescence, which has attracted so much 
attention in recent years, would issue in 
valuable practical suggestions for the guid- 
ance of those who deal with youth. Nor 
has it been barren of such issue ; many of 
its findings are already the commonplaces 
of educational literature. No other portion 
of this field of research, moreover, has pos- 
sessed such compelling interest or been so 
richly fruitful as that which deals with the 
religious experience of youth. A new vi- 
sion of the meaning of religious work for 
youth has been opened to men, with new 
renderings of the aims, ideals, expectations, 
materials and methods of religious educa- 
tion. Our next task will be to develop, 
from that course of spiritual development 
which has been shown to be typical of ado- 

201 



202 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

lescence, certain working principles as to the 
aims and expectations in accordance with 
which religious work for youth is to be con- 
ceived and organized. 

Since youth stands by itself as a period of 
life unique in significance, the aim of relig- 
ious work for youth is to be sharply distin- 
guished from the aim of religious work for 
childhood or maturity. The distinction is 
found in the necessity for the complete fusion 
of the evangelistic and educational ideals for 
youth. With men they are divided. Those 
who are mature in character and settled in 
habit are treated as either believers or unbe- 
lievers. Religious work for them proceeds 
upon the assumption that they have either 
some established personal faith to be de- 
veloped and encouraged, or a settled unbe- 
lief not easily overthrown. The object of 
religious work for men is correctly enough 
divided into two departments according to 
the old program — to convert sinners and 
edify saints. To children, however, this dis- 
tinction is not properly applied. They are 
not as yet either believers or unbelievers, 
Christians or skeptics, saints or sinners. 



AIMS ANB EXPECTATIONS 203 

They are the subjects of a religious develop- 
ment that has only begun. The object of 
religious work with children is to promote 
that development, postponing the attempt 
to separate believers from unbelievers until 
years of discretion are reached. The dis- 
tinctive aim is to draw out the religious 
capacities of the child by impressing him 
deeply with the objective realities of relig- 
ion — the being and fatherhood of God, the 
life and sacrifice of Christ, the fundamental 
requirements of the moral law and the Chris- 
tian life. 

Now the youth are like children in that 
they are not to be sharply divided into 
Christians and unbelievers : but they are un- 
like the children in that they have reached 
years of discretion and personal choice. 
The distinctive aim of religious work with 
youth, therefore, is the adjustment of the 
subjective life to the religious ideal. This 
is the one aim of evangelism, and religious 
work for youth is fundamentally evangelis- 
tic. The adjustment in view, however, is 
not to be regarded as a thing that is 
achieved by a single act of will, or in a brief 



204 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

time ; with a man it may be this, but with 
a youth it is, normally, a process running 
through some years. The method of secur- 
ing it is, therefore, naturally and essentially, 
educational. Religious work for youth is 
distinguished from that for the child or the 
mature Christian by its deliberate evan- 
gelistic aim, its purpose to secure personal 
choice of the religious life ; it is distin- 
guished from that for the mature unbe- 
liever by its educational method. It can- 
not fail to be evangelistic, because it must 
seek to bring the soul to God in explicit 
personal choice ; it cannot fail to be educa- 
tional, because the adjustment of the soul 
which it seeks is an orderly development of 
an inner capacity for divine fellowship. An 
education in religion that neglects the need of 
voluntary, personal determination of spiritual 
relationships is not suited to youth ; neither is 
an evangelistic method that seeks a short cut 
to a Christian life. N othing but a thorough- 
going adjustment of the entire personal life 
to the divine order can satisfy our ideal. 
This means that, for youth, the ideals of 
evangelism and education in religion coalesce. 



AIMS AKD EXPECTATIONS 205 

Elsewhere thej are distinct ; here they are 
completely fused. The first principle of 
religious work for youth is that the evan- 
gelistic aim and the educational method are 
to be blended into one inclusive, far-reach- 
ing design. 

This being the general aim, there is em- 
braced under it a definite specific aim for 
each of youth's three periods. 

For early adolescence, the specific aim is 
the assistance of the soul to a distinct, indi- 
vidual, moral character. Religious influ- 
ences are to help adolescent boys and girls 
to achieve their freedom, to discover 
and realize their distinctive individuality. 
Wherever, in the name of religion, we 
hinder this process, we are only endeavor- 
ing to thwart nature and God. Parents, 
teachers and pastors on the one hand, and 
the youth on the other, should come to an 
explicit understanding that the youth is to 
have all the freedom that belongs to him, 
and is to be assisted to it by his religious 
advisers as fast as he can bear it. The 
point at which systems of religious educa- 
tion generally break down is their failure, 



206 EDUCATIOKAL EVAKGELISM 

or inability, to make provision for the 
necessary individuation of the soul in youth. 
Nothing is more unfortunate than to give 
the youth the impression that religion re- 
quires him to forego his personal independ- 
ence. The true educational method will 
understand that the day must come when 
the young soul, like a new-formed star, 
must swing itself free from the mass of 
which it has been a part and orb itself into 
a separate completeness ; and it will pro- 
pound as its controlling ideal for the early 
years of adolescence the achievement of a 
free character, controlled no longer from 
without by artificial supports and external 
restraints, but from within by a sovereign 
law of self-government. 

The specific method by which religious 
guides are to promote the achievement of a 
free character by the youth is a gradual, 
though often rapid, relaxation of outward 
control accompanied at every step by in- 
sistence on self-control. They are to urge 
upon the youth his individual responsibility, 
and make him bear it in increasing measure. 
They are to abjure the tone of authority, 



AIMS AND EXPECTATIOIS^S 207 

remind the j^outh that he is not only free 
but responsible, and urge him, in a friendly 
and companionable way, to act as a free 
person and learn to bear the consequences 
of his own actions. Kestraint may still be 
exercised where the youth is not seriously 
concerned to claim his freedom ; but w^hen 
he is keenly anxious to take a matter in 
charge himself and is willing to assume all 
the responsibility, it is usually a mistake to 
refuse him the privilege. The teaching of 
pulpit and classroom should now make 
clear the requirements of a free life. The 
youth is to be made to understand that 
the message of life to him is not a mere 
invitation to come forth into the broad 
fields of opportunity and roam at will, but 
a challenge to come out and try his 
strength, show w^hat there is of ability and 
resource in him, see how he can stand 
up under life's burdens, and meet those 
tests of skill and readiness and endurance 
which are not a game but a destiny. Only 
those are ready for this challenge who have 
acquired good self-command. The ideal of 
perfect self-mastery is to shine resplendent 



208 EDrCATlOKAL EVANGELISM 

before the eyes of youth. Let him know 
that life requires him to be master of him- 
self in fact as well as in name ; that self- 
government means that he shall be able to 
force his blundering hands to acquire skill, 
compel his reluctant mind to think and 
learn, and hold himself, through weariness 
and discouragement, to a steadfast purpose. 
If he would be free, let him make sure of 
the sufficiency of the law within to govern 
him before he casts off the law without. 

For the middle period of adolescence, the 
distinctive aim of the religious work that 
seeks the adjustment of the young person's 
life to the divine order should be to equip 
him with a stock of religious ideas. This 
aim of course runs through all the instruc- 
tion of earlier and later years ; but it is to 
stand forth in especial prominence at this 
time. With all our emphasis on right teach- 
ing, it does not appear that the importance 
of the mental period is half realized by re- 
ligious workers. Professor James has said 
that it is difficult to get a new idea into a 
man's mind after he is thirty years old ; one 
may venture the proposition, pedagogical 



AIMS AND EXPECTATIONS 209 

heresy though it may appear, that it is as 
difficult to get an idea, in the same sense of 
the word, into the mind of a boy before he 
is fifteen. Not that children do not learn, 
and remember what they learn ; there is no 
disputing the old maxim that the mind of 
the child is wax to receive and marble to 
retain. But with all their powers of acquisi- 
tion, just what the children do not acquire 
is — ideas. They lay the foundations of 
knowledge, they accumulate the materials 
and tools to think with. But the work of 
thinking out a stock of ideas, that shall be 
regulative for the soul through all its future 
career, that shall, in fact, constitute one's 
mental equipment for life, is performed in 
middle adolescence, neither earlier nor later. 
We carry through life many impressions re- 
ceived in childhood, but the ideas with w^hich 
we live and by which we are controlled to 
the end are commonly acquired in the men- 
tal period of youth. 

Here, then, is the time when the great 
truths of the Christian religion are to 
be set before the growing mind in their 
most stimulating form. Thought is to be 



210 EDUCATIOl^AL EVANGELISM 

encouraged — independent, unconventional 
thought ; originality is not to be quenched ; 
dogmatism must be banished. But those 
who would help the youth are to insist that 
thought shall be thorough, that the mind 
shall dwell on ideas, not fancies, grasp 
realities, not dreams, and rest in truths, 
not half-truths. It is to be considered more 
important, at this time, to become inured 
to the work of thinking than to hasten to 
the conclusions in a wide range of thought. 
To think one's way through some one ques- 
tion, unraveling all the snarls and putting 
the matter in right relations on every side, 
is better than finding out what others have 
thought- about a hundred questions. The 
struggles with doubt and uncertainty that 
are so characteristic of this period are 
nearly always brought on by diflBculty 
with some one point — more often concern- 
ing the application of truth to life than 
concerning the validity of doctrinal truth ; 
and it is the common testimony that to 
settle one's doubts on the particular points 
of difficulty usually disposes of them all. 
For real thought does not go very far until 



AIMS AKD EXPECTATTOlfS 211 

it discovers that any one point leads to 
every other, so that when one has solved 
life's meaning in one aspect he has solved it 
for all. 

It is to be a principle with religious 
guides of youth, that when the mental 
powers are developing most rapidly they 
are to be fed with the food of thought, and 
exercised upon genuine tasks. The defect 
of much teaching in this period is that it 
takes all zest and reality out of the tasks of 
thought by leaning from the first upon a 
foregone conclusion. The thinking of the 
fathers, however valid, will not answer for 
the youth ; he is called to w^ork out for 
himself a respectable set of ideas and be- 
liefs, and it should be real w^ork. The 
greatest peril of this time is not thought, 
investigation, even doubt, but the refusal to 
think, the tolerance that is mere laziness, 
laying down an argument without pursuing 
it to the end, the indolence that com- 
promises on agnosticism for lack of energy 
to think. The personal adjustment of the 
soul to God is not to be thought of as 
chiefly an intellectual matter ; but man is 



212 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

morally responsible for the use of his think- 
ing powers, and as an intelligent being is 
required to discover for himself a rational 
modus vivendi in view of the intelligible 
world of truth. 

For later adolescence, the specific aim of 
religious work should be the adjustment of 
personal and social relations. The youth is 
now to become an effective social force 
within the institutions that make for human 
welfare. Every consideration, natural, po- 
litical, ethical, religious, now calls for the 
socialization of his personal power. As he 
takes his place in the world, becomes a 
factor in the social life of his community, 
finds his occupation and life-work, enters 
upon the rights and duties of citizenship, 
and prepares for those of a new home of 
his own, the ranking need and interest 
of his spiritual nature is an interpretation 
of the social ideal and an enforcement 
of its claims upon his capacities for social 
service. 

The function of religion in this social ad- 
justment of youth is primarily to develop 
the Christian social spirit. The social ideal 



AIMS AND EXPECTATIONS 213 

is the kingdom of God. The meaning of 
the organized life of mankind as a progress- 
ive realization of God's kingdom is to be 
interpreted to youth, and the need of a 
religious spirit in the conduct of all human 
affairs made clear. The youth is to view 
himself as a factor in the world-life whose 
value is proportionate to the power of the 
Christian spirit of faith and service in him. 
He is now to learn that the Christian re- 
ligion is the great spiritual dynamic for 
rendering the organized life of humanity a 
blessing to all, and that Christian institutions 
are the centers whence this dynamic oper- 
ates upon the world. 

As one step toward the perfect socializa- 
tion of the youth as a Christian factor in 
the world, religious work aims to secure for 
him a felicitous adjustment within the insti- 
tutions of religion. In the ideal case, which 
is not rare but very common, the youth, hav- 
ing learned to meet individual responsibility 
efficiently, and having thought out his per- 
sonal creed, becomes a member of the church 
at the beginning of the social period or 
shortly before. The socialization of his re- 



214 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

ligious life is the precursor of the adjust- 
ments soon to be made to the new social 
duties of the state and home, and his con- 
nection with corporate religion is to furnish 
inspiration for the effective application of 
his personality to the tasks that become his 
portion of the world's work. To secure the 
identification of the youth with the church, 
therefore, after he has learned the meaning 
of personal responsibility and acquired a 
stock of personal religious convictions, but 
early in the social period, is to be made a 
specific aim of religious work. 

As we see it, then, the aim of religious 
work for youth is to secure the complete 
and harmonious adjustment of the personal 
life to the divine order; including in this 
adjustment the intelligent acceptance of 
personal responsibility for one's life and 
acts, the acquisition of a well-wrought set 
of regulative ideas and beliefs, and an effec- 
tive adjustment of personal power to the 
demands of social service, both within and 
without the church. Nothing short of this 
satisfies or even approaches the ideal for 
youth ; to be satisfied with any lesser aim is 



AIMS AND EXPECTATI0:N^S 215 

to fall below the standard set by the soul of 
j^outh itself. 

The study of the religious experience of 
adolescence has also made more clear the 
expectations that are to be entertained by 
those engaged in religious work for youth. 

To clear the ground of false expectations 
at the outset : There is no warrant for ex- 
pecting that children who are religiously 
minded can always be led up to manhood's 
faith without periods of doubt and skep- 
ticism ; or that the religious pathway of 
youth can always be made smooth and 
easy ; or that anything can take away the 
uncertainty, turmoil, restlessness and un- 
easy temper of youth ; or that any great 
number of youth will follow, except in the 
most general way, *any particular course 
marked out for them ; or that anything like 
uniformity of religious experience for both 
sexes and all temperaments can be secured ; 
or that souls will be won, in any great 
numbers, by system ; or that any one 
method or instrumentality can appeal to 
and satisfy all youth ; or that a majority of 
the youth ought to join the church in early 



216 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

adolescence ; or that any plan or system that 
may be devised will bring all even of the 
serious-minded and well-intentioned youth 
into the church. 

But, positively, it is to be expected that 
religious work, properly conceived and un- 
dertaken, will find a powerful ally in the 
nature of the youth himself. It will count 
upon nature to further the work of grace in 
the young heart. The better we understand 
the soul of youth and the gospel of Christ, 
the more evident is the fitness of the one 
for the other. The essential spiritual proc- 
esses of youth's development, which must 
represent the Creator's design and intent for 
the soul, point unmistakably to just such an 
adjustment of the personal life to the divine 
will as an enveloping environment as the 
gospel of Christ seeks to bring about. The 
blunders of youth in his first use of free- 
dom, his experience with sin, the inevitable 
discover}^ of the reaction of his deeds upon 
himself, show him early his need of a divine 
Eedeemer and Lord. It will surely tend to 
impart sanity and steadiness to our evangel- 
istic efforts in behalf of young people if it 



AIMS AND EXPECTATI0:N^S 217 

is anderstood that it is the part of evangel- 
ism to assist nature, not to contravene it. 
The soul of the youth is to be formed, 
rather than reformed ; and even where rad- 
ical reform is necessary, it is not to be re- 
constructed on some other plan than na- 
ture's. There may be a necessary conflict 
between nature and grace in the heart of 
the mature sinner whose soul has been first 
deformed and then ossified in its malforma- 
tions, but in youth nothing but unnature 
works against the purposes of God's grace. 
Accordingly, it is to be expected that na- 
ture will provide a proper and sufficient 
safeguard for youth's freedom when the 
time of estrangement comes. This is found 
in the conscience of the youth himself. We 
have seen that conscience is formed in the 
period that precedes the outburst of adoles- 
cent life. The measure of a youth's pros- 
pects of success in a free life is the efficiency 
of his conscience. And perhaps the most 
reassuring fact among the phenomena of 
adolescence is that amid all the storm and 
stress, the overturnings and readjustments 
of this time, no other feature of the inner 



218 EDUOATIOlf AL EVANGELISM 

life maintains itself so uncompromisingly as 
conscience. When the soul puts away the 
things of childhood, the lessons of elders, 
the counsels of experience, even its own 
early ideals and religious faith, conscience 
still repeats its undeniable "you ought." 
In dividing itself from all that is not self, 
the soul finds conscience on the hither side 
of the line ; in all alienation, that is inalien- 
able. It may indeed become hardened by a 
career of evil-doing, its voice be silenced by 
repeated disobedience ; but that takes time ; 
in the awakening soul of adolescence, we 
are to expect to find conscience at its 
best. 

But what is an efficient conscience ? It 
is not a supersensitive conscience^ or a pru- 
dish conscience, or a fearful conscience. It 
is a conscience that makes duty plain, and 
lays upon one a compelling imperative to 
perform it. As commonly understood, con- 
science is both a power of moral discern- 
ment and a sense of obligation. The first is 
its intellectual, the second its moral side. 
The power of moral discrimination is more 
or less dependent on one's general intelli- 



AIMS AND EXPECTATIONS 219 

gence, but the sense of obligation is not 
thus conditioned. It is the core of the 
moral nature, the spinal column of the soul. 
One is strong in the elements of character 
just in proportion to the strength within him 
of a compelling sense of personal obligation. 
Strength of conscience is manifested, not by 
any finical sensitiveness about doing certain 
questionable things, but by the vigor and 
intensity with which one feels his obligation 
to do the things that are unquestionably 
good. JSTo external safeguard of any kind, 
nothing but a miracle, can save a youth if 
he has no conscience ; but if his conscience 
has been formed aright, and he enters the 
storm-belt of adolescence with a masterful 
sense of his personal responsibility, there is 
no need to fear what the world or the flesh 
or the devil can do to him. 

It is to be expected also that a natural 
spiritual development will in a few years at 
longest put a period to the most unpleasant 
features of youth's estrangement. After 
the first flush of independence, there comes 
the time of sober second thought. This is 
to be anticipated, watched for, planned for. 



220 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

Religious work is to count upon a real 
movement of progress toward a less antag- 
onistic spirit and a better mind ; it is just 
possible that fewer youth would be arrested 
in their development at the point of religious 
estrangement if they were not so often 
given to understand that that first step of 
progress is looked upon as the final one. 
Spasmodic evangelism attempts to win a 
self-assertive youth, fails, and gives over the 
effort with a tone of despair that often 
makes the youth actually believe that he has 
sinned away his day of grace. Educational 
evangelism lets him try his freedom, makes 
him feel his responsibility, counts on the 
sobering effect of experience, w^atches for 
the appearance of the broader thought and 
the awakening of the instincts that point to 
the spirit's reconciliation, and, keeping near 
him through the whole of this development, 
never lets him dream that he has finished 
his course or reached a stopping-place, much 
less that he is hopelessly lost. 

With regard to the fruition, in the social 
period of youth and later, of religious work 
conducted on the principles of educational 



AIMS AND EXPECTATIONS 221 

evangelism, it is to be expected, for one 
thing, that it will result in many Christian 
characters of the finest type. They cannot 
be produced by the wholesale, any more 
than the public schools can make Masters 
of Arts of all their pupils. But those who 
come to a Christian manhood or womanhood 
through a youth in which religious training 
has always been broadly evangelistic in aim 
and soundly educational in method should 
generally be well grounded in the faith, in- 
telligent, with a fine appreciation of spiritual 
things, efficient in practical service, compe- 
tent to bear heavy moral burdens and meet 
the strain of living for God in an unholy 
world. Thej" are likely to possess a sense 
of proportion that will restrain them from 
religious extravaganza, and forbid them also 
to belittle religion or its just claims. 
Schooled to the work of the church from the 
time they are ready for social service, they 
will be skilful and efficient workers for the 
Master. And it is chiefly among those whose 
faith has ripened under this wise and thorough 
culture that we must look for that depth of 
conviction without which men and churches 



222 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

may be busy but never prosperous, big but 
never great, showy but never strong. 

A very important fruit to be expected 
from such religious treatment of youth as 
we demand is a better temper and attitude 
toward religion among those who do not 
come into the church. The sorest charges 
made against the revival system relate to its 
effects upon the souls that are turned away 
from religion, driven into deeper doubt and 
outright unbelief, taught to become scoffers 
and mockers, by its methods. If the relig- 
ion of Christ is presented to the growing 
soul in accordance with its real needs as 
they become manifest, it can never appear 
to that soul a mass of deception, the inven- 
tion of priests or fanatics, or a thing to be 
ridiculed and despised. Under the most 
favorable circumstances, there is every prob- 
ability that large numbers of men will fail 
to become professors of religion ; but what 
temper they shall display toward religion 
will depend upon the manner in which re- 
ligious duties and doctrines have been set 
before them. A large, wise, loving, faith- 
ful treatment of the youth by educational 



AIMS AND EXPECTATION'S 223 

methods will leave no such scars upon their 
spirits in after days as many are disfigured 
with to-day. 

There is warrant also for expecting that 
such religious work for youth as an educa- 
tional system with a large evangelistic aim 
prescribes will contribute largely to the res- 
toration of religion to its rightful preemi- 
nence among human concerns. Much is be- 
ing said of the weakening of the hold of re- 
ligion upon men, marked by the decay of 
power in the pulpit, of deep conviction in 
the pews, of the influence of the church. 
If religion has lost respect, is it not partly 
because it has so often been rendered con- 
temptible by its adherents ? Some religious 
institutions and efforts are despised because 
they deserve to be. And is not the educa- 
tional approach to religion — not the intellec- 
tual study of religion, but the approach to the 
whole spiritual concern of man by an ordered 
and wisely guided development of his inner 
capacities — the surest remedy for all this ? 
If religion wants influence, it should have 
done with haste and intemperate zeal and 
short cuts and claptrap, cease endeavoring 



224 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

to meet permanent demands by temporary 
expedients, and go about its work with a 
breadth of design and a steadiness of pur- 
pose worthy of its high claims, and a move- 
ment toward its ends that is as unhasting 
and as unresting as the ongoing of life itself. 
The displacement of religion from the gen- 
eral educational system of our land, and the 
failure as yet to provide an adequate, re- 
spect-compelling system to supply the lack, 
go far to explain the degradation of religion 
from its former prestige among us. To re- 
cover such a portion of that prestige as 
rightfully belongs to it — no one wants it to 
monopolize attention as it once did — there 
are several things to be done, but none more 
effective than to provide for every youth an 
educational approach to personal religion, a 
religious training that is everywhere evangel- 
istic in purpose but educational in method, 
that shapes its expectations year by year in 
accordance with the work that nature is then 
doing in the soul, and counts upon the sav- 
ing grace of God to work along the lines of 
spiritual development in youth, not against 
them nor across them. A generation so 



AIMS AND EXPECTATIONS 225 

trained will not all be church-members, in- 
deed ; but they will not hate the church 
and despise religion ; in their hearts they 
will revere both, and worship the God from 
whom they come. 



CHAPTER X 
Agencies and Methods 

Those who are engaged in Christian 
work for youth are sometimes repelled and 
disheartened by the impossible demands made 
upon them in the name of scientific method. 
A conception of that work, however, which 
makes it pursue the evangelistic aim through- 
out by educational appeals to the naturally 
unfolding powers of the soul, will go far to 
fit the scientific demands to the practical 
situation. Progress will come smoothly 
where it is agreed, on the one hand, that re- 
ligious education in the formative years of 
youth is not to waste precious time in the 
non-religious study of religion, — the scien- 
tific study of the history and philosophy of 
religion, of ethics and Christian evidences, 
of the historical and literary criticism of the 
Bible, and such like subjects, is for later 
years — on the other hand, that reliance 
226 



AGENCIES AND METHODS 227 

for making disciples of the youth is to be 
placed chiefly on their educational treat- 
ment, not on sentimental influences or emo- 
tional appeals. 

This conception of religious work for 
young people has already in fact been widely 
adopted. It is being discovered that the 
principles and methods to which the church 
has been brought by the experience of the 
last century are in essence identical with the 
principles and methods to which we are shut 
up by the psychological and pedagogical re- 
quirements of youth. The educational- 
evangelistic ideal is already implicit in the 
prevailing conception and organization of 
religious work; its explicit adoption calls 
for no overturning of established institu- 
tions and no new machinery, but tends rather 
to simplify our complex ecclesiastical life. 
For this reason, educational evangelism 
offers an entirely feasible program for the 
ordinary church in its work. The agencies 
and methods required by its principles are 
already at hand, as we shall quickly see. 

There are four chief instruments of edu- 
cation — impression, instruction, association 



228 EDTTCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

and self-expression. These answer in a gen- 
eral way to the four principal forms of re- 
ligious exercise, worship, discipleship, fel- 
lowship and service ; and from the use to 
be made of these instruments to promote the 
religious adjustment of the soul to God, the 
primary principles governing the agencies 
and methods of religious work for youth 
may be deduced. 

Impressions are the atmosphere of con- 
sciousness. Good or bad, they bear the 
same relation to the health of the mind as 
the air we breathe bears to that of the body. 
Of all the instruments of education, they 
should receive first consideration, because 
they come firsthand carry farthest. Bush- 
nell called that period of the child's life be- 
fore he acquires the use of language the age 
of impressions, and held it to be the most 
important time for shaping the child's char- 
acter by nurture. Sensitiveness to impres- 
sions, however, continues throughout child- 
hood, and it is interesting to observe that 
the experience of infancy in this respect is 
suggestively repeated in early adolescence. 



AGENCIES AND METHODS 229 

Like the infant, the youth is without lan- 
guage to express himself. His powers of 
appreciation develop rapidly, leaving the 
powers of expression far behind. With only 
the language of childhood at his command, 
he is receiving constant revelations of a new 
realm of life. He can find no words to em- 
body the suggestions, atmospheric notions, 
hazy ideas that are borne in upon him. No 
more than the infant, can he tell all that he 
thinks. No less than the infant, he is busy 
all the time receiving upon a keenly sensi- 
tive soul and recording in an active memory 
lasting impressions of which at present he 
gives no sign. 

The greatest care is therefore to be exer- 
cised to give the youth correct impressions 
of the Christian life. His impressions are 
mostly gathered from two sources, the be- 
havior of Christian people, and the public 
exercises of religion. On the principle of 
suggestion, they exercise a vast degree of 
control over thought and conduct where 
more explicit counsels would be disregarded 
or forgotten. It is futile to tell a youth that 
the Christian life is good if he sees that 



230 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

Christian people find it distasteful, that our 
faith is full of joy and peace if our actions 
show anxiety and discontent, that worship 
is a delight if it is made tedious and irksome, 
that the church is an institution of divine 
splendor if it is neglected and despised by 
the community. No effort is to be spared, 
on the contrary, to impress the young mind 
with the sincerity of the faith of Christian 
people, the strengthening and consoling 
power which they find in religion, their 
genuine conviction that he is missing some- 
thing unspeakably precious if he is not 
himself living the Christian life. Christian 
men and women with the eyes of youth 
upon them must not pose, nor blow the 
trumpet before them in the streets, but they 
should take good heed to the impression that 
their Christian conversation is making. 

But the special form of religious exercise 
that makes largest use of impressions for edu- 
cational purposes is public worship. To what 
has already been said of the place of the youth 
in the services of worship, it is here to be added 
that these services should give him a har- 
monious and profound impression of the 



AGENCIES AND METHODS 231 

reality of God and the soul, the power of 
the spiritual world upon our present, the 
dignity of duty and the authority of con- 
science. No other agency can make these 
impressions as well as the church services. 
The disastrous fault of some children's re- 
ligious societies is found in the havoc that 
they make of the child's more wholesome 
religious impressions ; they seem to make 
religion a matter of fidgety busyness instead 
of a simple and beautiful relation of the soul 
to God. If we look for right impressions, 
few agencies and simple methods must be 
the rule. Complexity of religious duties 
tends to distraction. Everything about pub- 
lic worship, from the style of the building 
to the announcing of a hymn, is to be given 
consideration for the impression that it will 
make on the young mind ; and those who 
are responsible for the exercises of public 
w^orship in church, Sunday-school, prayer- 
meeting and elsewhere, are guilty of disas- 
trous carelessness if they allow lifeless 
preaching, slovenly praying, fantastic testi- 
mony, irreverent and ridiculous singing, or 
any other such thing, to give the youth a 



232 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

false impression concerning the dignity, 
beauty, worth and satisfactoriness of the re- 
ligion of Jesus Christ. Where the religious 
education of children and youth through 
their impressions is made a definite object 
of endeavor, much thought will be given to 
the worship and the general atmosphere of 
the Bible school, and great care taken in the 
conduct of all children's and young people's 
meetings ; the frequent but unforced attend- 
ance of the children, and the regular attend- 
ance of the youth, at the services of the 
church will be sought, largely for the sake 
of the impressions there made ; and the ar- 
rangement of this service, with its prayers. 
Scripture, music, offering, sermon and sac- 
rament will be made with the presence of 
these impressionable young persons in mind. 

As an instrument of education, instruc- 
tion is so important that it has often 
been identified with education itself. Even 
where the other instruments are duly recog- 
nized, instruction is still made prominent as 
furnishing the framework for a progressive 
educational course. An educational evan- 



AGENCIES AND METHODS 233 

gelism seeks the best possible instruction for 
the youth. There is no danger of over- 
intellectualism in religion from insisting 
that along with the other things involved in 
the personal adjustment of an intelligent 
being to a rational Creator, some knowledge 
in that being of that Creator and his ways 
is essential. To make a disciple is to make 
a learner. The effort to devise a course of 
religious instruction that shall be, year by 
year, correctly adapted' to the needs of the 
developing soul is to be ardently pursued ; 
and the demand for skilful and efficient in- 
structors deserves attentive heed. 

There is no occasion, however, for wast- 
ing present opportunities in wistful longing 
for a curriculum of unattainable pedagogical 
perfection, or for discouraging the present 
teaching forces with demands for a kind of 
skill and efficiency which they do not pos- 
sess and cannot acquire. The one thing 
needful is at hand. Because the Bible is a 
piece of vital literature, it speaks from life 
to life. The all-important thing is not the 
course of lessons or the special pedagogical 
skill of the teacher. It is rather the teach- 



234 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

er's insight into his work; and a few 
simple principles will go far to enable the 
average teacher to adapt the vital teachings 
of the Bible to the real needs of his pupils. 
It is to be his explicit aim to bring the souls 
of his class into right relations with the di- 
vine order, not by an occasional special 
appeal, but by an educational process that 
moves forward step by step through a series 
of years. In this process, the instruction 
given is a' conspicuous feature, and its ma- 
terials and methods are important, but not 
so important as the particular object which 
the teacher shall set before himself to be 
accomplished by any and all means in each 
period of his pupil's life. 

There are five successive objects to be at- 
tained by religious education, and to each of 
these in turn the teacher's instruction is to 
contribute. With the younger children, the 
object is to awaken and enrich the child's 
God-consciousness by making him familiar 
with the fundamental accounts of God's 
ways in nature and with men. With the 
children in the acquisitive period, the object 
is to impart a knowledge of God's Word ; 



AGENCIES AND METHODS 235 

the Bible, objectively vievved, is the theme, 
and acquisition the leading interest. Defi- 
nite lessons are to be assigned and required, 
and the child should feel that he is making 
real progress in knowledge. The devotional 
tone is not to be wanting in such study, but 
it is easily overworked. The end in view is 
to get the conscience of the child firmly 
established upon the objective facts of re- 
ligious truth and the moral life ; and to 
this end, his attention is to be fixed upon 
the objective facts, and seldom diverted to 
the subjective states or emotions which those 
facts may rightly enough produce in him. 
Self-knowledge comes in youth ; now is the 
time to lay the substantial foundations of 
knowledge of that which is beyond one- 
self. 

The transition to adolescence calls for a 
marked change in the specific object of 
the teacher's work. If the character of his 
teaching changes as rapidly as the nature of 
the youth himself, the latter is not likely to 
think that he has outgrown the Sunday- 
school. Instruction must now assist him to 
a free character. During the years of early 



236 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

adolescence, when the soul is developing a 
moral individuality, instruction is to lay its 
emphasis on individual ethics. This is the 
major subject in the ideal course of instruc- 
tion for this period. Questions of personal 
conduct are now at the fore. The youth 
no longer is satisfied to learn, in an objec- 
tive way, what is right and what wrong; he 
wants to be led to an insight of his own 
into moral principles. But he does not 
want instruction in formal ethics. He pre- 
fers lessons from the book of life. Specific, 
vital instances, developing the principles of 
conduct by their illustration, are to be dwelt 
upon and pondered. Biblical biography 
would therefore seem to furnish the most 
suitable materials for this period. The study 
of the lives of the great personalities that 
move through the pages of Scripture, in the 
light of the peerless Life there recorded, is 
the best line to be pursued. Yet the illus- 
tration of vital principles of morality is not 
confined to Biblical characters, and biogra- 
phy is not the only material for teaching 
and enforcing them. Only let the teacher 
get the point of view, and conceive the pur- 



AGENCIES AND METHODS 237 

pose of his instruction to be the assistance 
of his pupils to a settlement of their moral 
principles in view of divine revelation and 
their personal obligations, and he can make 
a v^ery unpromising series of lessons serve 
his end. 

In the period of most rapid mental 
growth, interest is likely to pass from moral 
principles for the personal life to deeper 
questions of general and eternal truth. Here 
again the teaching must change its charac- 
ter as fast as the mind changes its point of 
view. The major subject for the middle 
period of adolescence is the fundamental 
truths of religion. These are not to be 
studied now as in childhood, in a detached 
and objective way, as lessons to be learned ; 
but the Christian doctrines are to be pre- 
sented as food for thought, ideas to be 
reckoned with in the shaping of one's per- 
sonal life. It is even possible now to study 
them in some formal, systematic scheme 
without making the work repulsive. Ab- 
stract truth, however, attracts but few minds, 
young or old ; the natural method of learn- 
ing a doctrine is to see how it came into 



238 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

the world and what it meant to those who 
first apprehended and declared it. Biblical 
history may therefore be made the medium 
for the development and exposition of Bib- 
lical truth ; the history of a thought reveals 
its bearing on life ; and that is what youth 
wants to know. 

The teacher of youth in the social period 
is to lead them to a knowledge of social 
ethics, to make them acquainted with the 
principles of social conduct, the interests 
and duties that bind men into social, polit- 
ical and ecclesiastical bodies. Now is the 
time for the study of the kingdom of God 
as the social ideal foreshadowed in the Old 
Testament, declared in the New, and being 
progressively realized in human society 
through Christian institutions. Biblical his- 
tory and doctrine are now the background 
against which are to be set forth the Chris- 
tian social ideal, the laws of Christian con- 
duct for the organic life of mankind, and the 
movements of Christian history toward the 
attainment of this ideal since New Testament 
times. The claims of the church should 
now be enforced, along with the religious 



AGENCIES AND METHODS 239 

sanction of the duties of a Christian man to 
his community, his associates and his family. 
The history of Christian institutions, past 
and present, of modern missions and the 
various benevolent and philanthropic enter- 
prises of our time, especially such as have 
particular claims upon the young people 
under instruction, furnish much educational 
material of value. It must be confessed 
that the customary treatment of Bible les- 
sons in the ordinary helps shows little ap- 
preciation of the need of the young people 
at this time for an education in social 
ethics. Yet the teacher who has possessed 
himself of the idea of religious education 
for a social being, and has discovered that 
the kingdom of God is the ruling concep- 
tion of the Bible from beginning to end, 
the theme of all the prophets, the end of all 
historical progress, the one object of the Re- 
deemer's coming, teaching and death, will 
not suffer for lack of material suitable to 
make an educational appeal to youth in this 
period. 

From what has been said, it would appear 
that the proper adaptation of religious in- 



240 EDTJCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

struction to growing youth is not so difficult 
or hopeless a thing as it has seemed to some. 
It is not necessary to adopt revolutionary 
methods or wait for an ideal curriculum ; the 
main thing has been done when every 
teacher has been made to see the definite 
object to be accomplished in a given period 
and taught to advance from one object to 
another as the pupils grow. And in this 
connection, the teaching function of the 
pulpit is not to be overlooked. It is com- 
monly the pastor's privilege and duty to 
lead old teachers and train new ones to this 
necessary insight into their work. He is 
also to be a teacher of youth. Aside from 
special classes of which he may take charge, 
he is to count himself the teacher of the 
church. There are some things which youth 
needs to learn that are better taught from 
the pulpit than in the classroom, by sermon 
or lecture than by lesson or text-book. The 
element of instruction underlies the inspira- 
tional and evangelistic features of all true 
preaching, and while there is good reason 
why the Sunday-schools cannot keep all the 
youth in their classes, there is no good rea- 



AGENCIES AKD METHODS 241 

son why the teaching of the pulpit should 
not appeal to all. Therefore, with a teach- 
ing pulpit and an average force of Sunday- 
school teachers who have been led to under- 
stand the dominant interests of the succes- 
sive periods of childhood and youth, and to 
watch for the transition from one period to 
another, there is no reason to despair of the 
competence of present agencies to cope with 
the task of the religious instruction of the 
youth. 

The third instrument of education is as- 
sociation. The doctrine of environment has 
led men to see a new importance in all the 
surrounding influences that affect human 
life. It is certainly true that external en- 
vironment, matters of food, raiment, hous- 
ing and ventilation, enter into the problems 
of character-building, and must be duly 
considered. Nevertheless, nine-tenths of 
the power of environment over character 
resides in the personal factors of the en- 
vironment. In every community, neighbor- 
hood or group, there is developed a kind of 
moral magnetic field of particular character 



242 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

and well-nigh irresistible power. Whoever 
continues long under its influence is assimi- 
lated, almost certainly, to the character of 
the persons who make it up. But it is im- 
portant to remember that the really effect- 
ive personal environment of a youth is 
often made up of a very few persons, or 
even of one. In the close attachments that 
are formed between comrades, classmates, 
shopmates and friends, and in the hero wor- 
ship in which youth indulges so freely, it 
often happens that the personality of one 
envelops that of the other to the practical 
exclusion, for the time, of all other personal 
influences ; nothing else counts but the in- 
fluence of this one. Whence it follows that 
the entrance into one's field of experi- 
ence of a single new, forceful personality 
may entirely change one's spiritual environ- 
ment. He may continue to live in the same 
home with all the same surroundings, meet- 
ing the same companions at work or play, 
but his mind and spirit live in a new world 
of thought, emotion and purpose furnished 
by the new personality. This is the secret 
of the almost unbounded power of some 



AGENCIES AND METHODS 243 

teachers over their pupils, of some pastors 
over the young people with whom they be- 
come really intimate. And this truth is to 
add hope and zest to efforts in behalf of 
those whose circumstances are adverse to 
the attainment of Christian character. 

How is the educational power of associa- 
tions to be most effectively utilized in the 
promotion of Christian character in the 
youth ? The attempt has been made to 
guide the associations that young people 
shall form, and to bring them together in 
w^holesome fellowship under right auspices 
and good influences, by means of formal re- 
ligious organizations. The effort has been 
instructive, and has brought us within sight 
of the very principle concerning such or- 
ganizations that is implied in the dominant 
interests of the successive periods of youth; 
namely, that formal and established organ- 
izations or societies have their place in the 
social period, but have little power over 
youth before that period is reached. 

In all associations of youth before the 
social period begins, the sexes are to be kept 
apart, and the group system followed. The 



244 EDTTCATIOKAL EVANGELISM 

fellowship of boys and of girls is to be 
found, not in any formal organization, but 
in natural groups. Of themselves they form 
congenial groups, and, as a rule, these groups 
formed by natural selection are the best as- 
sociations possible. Eeligious work must 
take advantage of and cooperate with this 
natural disposition of youth to form small 
groups of intimates, boys and girls apart. 
This way lies success in dealing with them. 
Even where the group is not what it ought 
to be, it must be accepted as a fact, and it is 
seldom wise to try to break it up. If the 
gang spirit, with its usual lawlessness, ap- 
pears, there is indeed something to fear, but 
the gang itself 'may be turned into an effec- 
tual educational agency, as has been done 
not only by successful settlement workers in 
the cities who have had bad gangs to deal 
with, but by every Sunday-school teacher 
who has known how to develop a good class 
spirit in a group of mischievous boys. 

It is the especial advantage of the Sun- 
day-school class over every other possible 
organization for youth that it usually is one 
of these naturally formed groups. More 



age:^cies and methods 245 

formal associations have no intrinsic fitness 
or attraction for this age ; each group wants 
to form its own organization or club. It is 
best to encourage them to do so, and to let 
them be as choice of their set, and as ex- 
clusive, for the time, as they wish. The 
failure of the Intermediate Endeavor Socie- 
ties to achieve any success at all commen- 
surate with that of the Young People's and 
Junior Societies is most instructive here. It 
is not difficult for a competent leader to en- 
list large numbers of the younger boys and 
girls in a Junior Society ; and the young peo- 
ple of social age find a Young People's or- 
ganization to their mind. These societies 
can be maintained as established features of 
a parish organization through many genera- 
tions of members. But with those in earlier 
and middle adolescence, the case is different. 
The Intermediate Society strikes a snag at 
once in the difficulty of bringing boys and 
girls of this age together for any hearty co- 
operation. Supposing this to be overcome, 
most properly by planning separate societies 
for the boys and the girls, it is comparatively 
easy to form a certain group of them into 



246 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

the desired organization ; it is their society 
or club. But it is extremely difficult, in a 
year or so, to bring the next group into the 
same organization ; it is not theirs, and they 
want one of their own. Thus experience 
leads to the practical conclusion that it is 
fighting against nature to try to organize 
the youth of a parish into one inclusive 
religious association ; the better way is to 
recognize several little groups ; the organ- 
ized Sunday-school class is the model relig- 
ious association for this period. 

In this connection the secret of the value 
of pastors' classes of adolescent boys and 
girls is apparent. As set features of an edu- 
cational program, the usefulness of such 
classes is likely to be limited by formality ; 
but where a pastor takes one after another 
of the naturally formed groups of boys and 
girls into his confidence, and has the tact to 
be, for a season at least, one of their group, 
his influence is beyond estimation. He is 
not likely to use any fixed course of lessons 
with class after class, for every group needs 
different treatment. He may aim at defi- 
nite instruction, or seek to dispose of un- 



AGENCIES AND METHODS 247 

settled questions and bring the youth to the 
personal acceptance of the Christian life ; 
but his primary object is to put enough of 
the right kind of personality into his inter- 
course with these young spirits to create for 
them a new magnetic field, and thus develop 
in them a love for the highest associations. 

A few years ago it was discovered that 
the Young Men's Christian Associations 
were making a mistake by appealing to 
young men in the social period largely with 
physical apparatus, and since that time 
Boys' Departments have been developed by 
leaps and bounds, in which boys in the phys- 
ical period get the advantage of the physical 
apparatus of the gymnasium. The contrary 
mistake of depending on social apparatus 
to attract youths in the physical period has 
been made, — and generally discovered and 
abandoned. But the educational soundness 
of the policy of providing some religious 
social apparatus for the social period is be- 
yond question. At about the age when the 
High School course is usually completed, the 
social impulse asserts itself, the sexes begin 
to discover their common interests, and a 



248 EDUCATIONAI. EVANGELISM 

large class draws together with a common 
spirit. A little later, the smaller groups 
are scattered as the young people leave 
school and seek employment in new fields, 
often away from home ; where there has 
been exclusiveness or clannishness, it must 
now in the course of nature disappear or 
lose much of its force. The natural line of 
development now calls for the association 
of individuals in larger and more formal 
organizations; hence the established, in- 
clusive Young People's Society is now in 
place. What kind of Society it shall be; 
whether it shall be chiefly concerned with 
religious meetings or with practical good 
works ; whether it shall aim to include all 
the young people of the parish in a social 
organization or only the more devout in a 
united effort at spiritual improvement ; 
whether membership in it shall be regarded 
as a step toward church-membership or its 
members be chiefly those who are already 
communicants ; whether it shall represent a 
training school for young people in religious 
work or a specialized department of religious 
work in behalf of young people ; whether, 



AGEXCIES AIs^D METHODS 249 

in some fields, a separate society for the 
young people apart from the other parish 
organizations is needful ; — these and many 
such questions are to be decided in view of 
the special circumstances in each parish. 
But nothing can excuse the failure to offer 
youth in the social period the opportunity 
to form those associations with others of 
their own age which go so far to establish 
Christian character and develop personal 
usefulness in the service of God. 

The fourth instrument of education is 
self-expression. This also has its use in 
effecting the adjustment of a young person 
to the divine order. Just what that use 
shall be, depends upon the person. The one 
thing certain is that system and formality 
are practically impossible in this matter. 
Certain forms of religious self-expression 
are to be suggested as usual and fitting, 
but never prescribed, much less enforced. 
Youth rebels against the usual and the con- 
ventional, because what it needs is some 
unique self-expression to promote the de- 
velopment of a new self. The religious self- 



250 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

expression of youth is for this reason to 
be largely self -originated and wholly self- 
chosen. We have seen that differences of 
temperament and sex profoundly affect the 
experiences through which youths have to 
pass ; it is also to be observed that they 
modify the manner of self-expression even 
more than the form and intensity of the ex- 
perience. Even with identical experiences, 
persons of different temperaments will ex- 
press themselves in radically different ways ; 
and when the experiences themselves are so 
widely different as almost to preclude mu- 
tual understanding, it is futile indeed to pre- 
scribe certain forms of self-expression as 
the proper and desirable ones for all. 

Very little religious self-expression is to 
be looked for in early adolescence, or be- 
fore. This is not a time for expression but 
for reception and appreciation ; self-discov- 
ery is to precede self -revelation. The special 
religious activities that are now expressive 
and educational are confined chiefly to pri- 
vate prayer, study and thought upon re- 
ligious themes, and attendance at public serv- 
ices, without, however, being required to 



AGEKCIES ANB METHODS 251 

commit or express oneself very definitely. 
But the intense phj^sical vigor of the period 
points to the need of special effort to get 
the conception of religious obligation ex- 
pressed in the performance of the common 
duties of life ; religious motives are best 
manifested by self-control, and the glad and 
faithful performance of the work that is the 
present duty. 

The expression of one's beliefs, convictions 
and experiences in language may properly 
be attempted, in a cautious and tentative 
way, in the middle period of adolescence ; 
as the thoughts and convictions become 
clear and settled, the expression of them 
should become definite and positive. Yet 
this is the time to guard against self-conceit 
and censoriousness ; and the best self-ex- 
pression is the effort, which ought to meet 
with steadily increasing success, to bring 
one's own actions into somewhat nearer ac- 
cord with one's ideals. In the social period, 
religious self-expression comes most natu- 
rally through some form of social service. 
The time has arrived for the cultivation of 
religious fellowship, the exchange of ex- 



252 EDUCATIOIS^AL EVANGELISM 

periences and testimony for the mutual 
strengthening of an associated body of wor- 
shipers, the expression of one's participa- 
tion in the common religious life through 
the medium of common prayer. It is to be 
remembered, however, that the educational 
value of any form of self-expression is now 
precisely equivalent to its social value ; the 
educational benefit to be derived from giv- 
ing testimony in a prayer-meeting, for in- 
stance, is neither greater nor less than the 
good to be done by such testimony to those 
who hear. If some other form of religious 
self-expression is more useful, it is more 
educational. Young people of this period 
are to be enlisted in united Christian enter- 
prises for the accomplishment of practical 
good. They are to find out without further 
delay, by practical experience, what service 
they can best render to the kingdom, and 
to discipline themselves for the greatest 
possible effectiveness in their chosen lines 
of religious work. 

When our Lord stood by the grave of 
Lazarus and called him back to life, "he that 



AGEKCIES AND METHODS 253 

was dead came forth, bound hand and foot 
with grave-clothes ; and his face was bound 
about with a napkin." And the Lord bade 
those about hira, " Loose him, and let him 
go." 

Youth also is a resurrection. The child 
has died, and the youth comes wonderingly 
forth upon life, conscious that the garments 
that were his necessity hitherto are fetters 
now, and that his face is covered with a 
heavy veil. And the Lord's command to 
those who stand about with loving eager- 
ness to be of service to him is just, " Loose 
him, and let him go." 

The defenses and restraints with which 
we tenderly surround the child are hinder- 
ing grave-clothes to the youth, to be worn 
only in contravention of the divine com- 
mand. Our first religious duty to the youth 
is to throw him on his own responsibility. 
No doubt it is a dangerous thing to do, — 
let us be cautious ; it opens the door for a 
life of sin, — let us be warned. But it is 
necessary, — let us be reconciled ; it is nat- 
ural, — let us take courage ; and divinely or- 
dered, — let us have faith. 



254 EDUCATIOIS^AL EVANGELISM 

But can we let him go, and trust him to a 
free life, without some explicit pledge that 
he will make that life Christian ? When 
and where and how does the educational 
method expect to secure that decisive act of 
will by which a young person becomes a 
Christian ? What of decision days, pledges 
and self-consecrations ? We have written 
to little purpose if we have not yet made it 
plain that the appeal to the will is implicit 
in all the work of educational evangelism 
from first to last ; but we have written to 
little purpose if we have not also made it 
plain that the object of educational evangel- 
ism is not to secure one critical act of will, 
but to guide all acts of will ; and more than 
that, to shape and determine for God and 
the right the entire spiritual life of which 
the will is only a part. As the soul, like a 
flower of many petals, unfolds at the im- 
pulse of enlarging life, the religious educa- 
tion of the will should proceed along with 
the religious development of the entire 
spiritual nature. The inner life in all its 
aspects, mental, emotional and volitional, is 
to be shaped for God as a unit ; a life so 



AGENCIES AND METHODS 255 

formed will surely confess its God in its own 
convincing way. The aim is not so much 
to secure a particular kind of confession 
at a given time as to make sure that 
some genuine confession must come some 
time. 

It is indeed to be expected that there will 
be, in every community or parish, some pre- 
vailing way of making the first confession. 
It is surely imperative that there shall al- 
ways be before the youth some simple, rec- 
ognized mode of signifying the purpose to 
live a Christian life and the desire to enter 
the fellowship of the church ; no such pur- 
pose or desire should be allowed to go un- 
expressed for lack of opportunity and en- 
couragement to make it known. The sim- 
plest and most natural method of expression, 
the one most consonant with the character, 
tastes, traditions and religious surroundings 
of the individual, is the best. This for some 
is to rise for prayers in a public meeting, or 
to take a stand at a revival service, or to 
sign a pledge card, perhaps on a Sunday- 
school decision day, or on coming into a Young 
People's Society ; but there is nothing else 



256 EDtrCATIOKAL EVANGELISM 

so good as the simple personal avowal made 
in conversation with a friend, parent, teacher 
or pastor, to be followed at the fitting time 
by a public confession of faith. 

The meaning of this public confession, too, 
is to be interpreted to the youth, for it is 
widely misconceived. It is very properly 
associated with reception into the church. 
But too many look upon this as the final 
step, the attainment of the spiritual goal. 
To confess Christ and be received into the 
church is to them the end of religious de- 
velopment ; the faith which they acknowl- 
edge represents a finished creed ; they enter 
the fellowship of the saints, who have been 
washed clean from all sin, have attained the 
Christian character, among whom none un- 
worthy is allowed to enter. Many a youth, 
because of this view, holds himself long 
aloof from church-membership, counting 
himself unworthy ; and many another, en- 
tering in, is sorely disappointed to find the 
church itself imperfect and the heights of 
spiritual attainment still far above him. 

Very different is the idea of membership in 
the church set forth in the New Testament. 



AGENCIES AND METHODS 257 

It is indeed to be without spot or wrinkle or 
any such thing; but its glory is its Head, 
not its members. Those who enter it are 
called to be saints ; but their saintliness is 
not in perfection attained, but in perfection 
pursued as they follow the perfect Christ. 
The earthly church is not for those who have 
attained, but for those who press on ; not 
for those already made perfect, but for all 
penitent sinners, that they may be cleansed 
of their sin ; not for those only who are wise 
in the ways of God, but for his inexperienced 
children who would learn his ways ; not for 
those alone whose virtue is established, but 
for evil-doers who are learning to do well ; 
not a university for those who have taken 
one or more degrees for religious achieve- 
ment, but a common school where all God's 
children are to be taught his service ; not a 
select company of those in whom the image 
of the Master is especially displayed, but a 
host of those who are loyal to his ideals, 
though they follow them faintly and afar 
off. Its door should open easily to the faint- 
est and most timid knocking ; for it is 
God's Church, instituted by him for the bless- 



258 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

ing of his lowliest and weakest children ; 
Christ's Church, where publicans and harlots 
are welcome when they leave their sin to go 
with him. The youth is not to be suffered 
to believe that he is not eligible to enter the 
church until he has attained his ideals of 
Christian character, nor that when he en- 
ters the education of his spirit is all com- 
plete ; the church is given him as a divine 
assistant to aid him in a lifelong quest of 
truth, and worth, and God. 

And what of those, numerous in every 
community, who have reached mature years 
and gone the way of sin? Educational 
evangelism recognizes the need of special 
efforts in their behalf, which make use of 
other than educational means. It would say 
little of these efforts, save only that they 
are special, and should not be deemed neces- 
sary for the majority. It would assist them 
by laying the right foundation for character 
in these wanderers before they go astray, by 
suggesting methods based upon the neces= 
sary differences in the experiences through 
which different men must go on their way 
to the kingdom, and by pointing out the 



AGENCIES AND METHODS 259 

educational value of the experience of life, 
the sobering effects of his career upon the 
sinner, the waning or passing, in all except 
abnormal persons, of the youthful passions 
and ambitions which are the commonest oc- 
casion for a life of sin, and which, when 
they are exhausted, leave the soul empty for 
a divine infilling. The evangelism that re- 
lies upon educational methods does not claim 
the whole field ; its especial sphere is youth ; 
yet it remembers that life itself is education ; 
it expects the long years that commonly in- 
tervene between youth and death to do 
something for the soul, more especially if it 
has wandered far; it looks for men to 
advance in knowledge and grace, in all 
spiritual wisdom and understanding, in all 
virtue and Christlikeness, as they advance 
in years, and counts their educational dis- 
cipline ended only on the day of their as- 
sumption to the heavenly kingdom, where 
faith is changed for sight, prophecy for ful- 
filment, and the soul's possibilities for com- 
plete realization at last. 

In conclusion, the working principles to 



260 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

which our study leads may be conveniently 
summed up in the following theses of edu- 
cational evangelism ; if compression gives 
them the appearance of dogmatism, it is a 
fault of the form, not of the spirit. 

1. The Spirit of God finds his way into 
human lives along the lines of educational 
development ; regeneration comes by educa- 
tion as often as any other way. 

2. The natural order of the soul's devel- 
opment in youth is first the achievement of 
personal freedom, then the discovery of the 
meaning and unity of life, and finally a 
reconciliation and adjustment to the divine 
order, including one's earthly place and lot ; 
these stages overlap, but are not to be con- 
fused ; they take time, and are not to be 
artificially cut short ; they come to a natural 
end, when the special opportunity presented 
by each is forever past. 

3. Religious work for youth is to be 
planned and carried on in harmony with 
this order of development, not at cross pur- 
poses with it. 

4. Eeligious work for youth should 
therefore pursue the evangelistic aim — the 



AGENCIES AKD METHODS 261 

right adjustment of the personal life to the 
divine order, by the educational method — 
the orderly development of the soul's capac- 
ities for God. 

5. The specific aim of religious work for 
the early period of adolescence is to pro- 
mote the achievement of a free, individual, 
moral character, responsive to religious 
motives ; the specific method is that of 
steadily increasing the range of the youth's 
definite responsibility, with constant ap- 
peal to his sense of personal obligation to 
God, 

6. Conscience is the one effectual safe- 
guard of freedom, all external supports and 
restraints being futile without it. 

7. On the principle of suggestion, the 
impressions made in childhood and early 
youth go far to shape religious thought and 
conduct through life. 

8. The specific aim for the middle pe- 
riod of adolescence is to equip the soul with 
a stock of religious ideas and beliefs. 

9. The doctrines of the Christian faith 
furnish an ideal educational stimulus when 
offered to the youthful mind to be exam- 



262 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

ined, pondered and assimilated point by 
point, rather than as incontestable verities 
to be accepted in bulk. 

10. The discipline of doubt is not to be 
feared so much as the indolence that de- 
clines to think. 

11. The specific aim of religious work in 
the third period of youth is to secure the 
social adjustment of the individual life 
within the religious body. 

12. The commanding ideal for this age 
is the kingdom of God, the social ideal of 
humanity, to be progressively realized 
through the Christian home, church, state 
and other institutions. 

13. The instruction to be offered youth 
is to be governed by the specific aims above 
mentioned ; in the early period, it is to cen- 
ter about individual ethics and personal re- 
sponsibility ; in the second, about the truths 
of the faith and personal creeds ; in the 
third, about social and institutional religion 
and the place of the individual in the social 
whole. 

14. Suitable materials for the effective 
education of the spirit at every stage of de- 



AGENCIES AND METHODS 263 

velopment are found in the vital literature 
of the Bible. 

15. The appeal of the Divine Personal- 
ity is to be presented to the soul at every 
stage in accordance with its major interests 
at the time ; the direction and tone of this 
appeal being more important for the grad- 
ing of religious educational work than the 
materials or methods to be used. 

16. The place of the youth is in the 
church itself; but it is better that that 
place should be quite undefined, requiring 
no confessions or obligations, but affording 
stimulus for thought and growth. 

17. The power of environment over 
character rests chiefly in its personal fac- 
tors, and one strong personality may alter 
the entire character of a youth's effective 
spiritual environment. 

18. Children are not, as a rule, to be re- 
ceived into the church, or confirmed, until 
their free individual characters are formed 
and their personal creeds thought out ; that 
is not, ordinarily, before their sixteenth 
year. 

19. Previous to the social period, youths 



264 EDUCATIONAL EVANGELISM 

are to be dealt with either as individuals or 
in naturally formed groups, not in large 
bodies. 

20. Established organizations, formal so- 
cieties, and the like, are chiefly effective 
after the beginning of the social period, and 
count for little before that time. 

21. The experiences through which 
youth pass, and, still more decidedly, the 
forms of expression which they will adopt, 
are profoundly affected by both tempera- 
ment and sex ; and this precludes all possi- 
bility of a uniform system of religious de- 
velopment. 

22. The expression of the religious life 
of youth is to be sought in self-initiated or 
self-chosen forms of activity, rather than in 
established and conventional forms; what 
is wanted is self-activity and self-expression 
to promote self -development. 

23. No possible method or system can 
bring all into the Christian life in youth, or 
dispense with the necessity for the conver- 
sion of mature men. 

24. The education of a human spirit is 
never complete until, at whatever age, the 



AGENCIES AND METHODS 265 

free personality is brought at last into 
happy reconciliation with his Father. 

25. The common experiences of mature 
life in the free world are divinely ordered 
with a view to that final reconciliation. 



MAR 9 1905 



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